Kevin, Camilla, Jade and Sidoine

I used to spend hours as a child with my nose buried in books of baby names, picking out my favourites and soaking up their etymology. I wasn't in the least bit broody and this nymophila (careful!) turned out to be quite prophetic as several years later I would spend weeks "researching" the names of the characters in my latest stories. Even now, although most of my main recurring characters do have well established names, a few characters still trouble me and I often retweak their names. Of course, because I am interested in names and their meanings, by this stage, I have usually written into the story something relevant to the character's name--an Emma who turns out to be adulterous, a (female) Laurence whose name is conveniently similar to the name Florence, or the fact that the name Pierre is also the state capital of South Dakota (although pronounced differently).

Needless to say, I was delighted to receive a French academic-year diary because on each date, the name of saint or saints associated with that day were listed. Today is St Andrew's Day but other than Andrew, George, David and Patrick, saints days barely make most people's radar in the UK (and half the time, even these are forgotten--darn sarth, at least). In France, though, there is at least one saint for every day and children celebrate their saint's day as well as their birthday, although that was before les Americains and their dirty, Anglo-Saxon culture invaded; now, a) French children get called Kevin [keh-van], Jade and Camilla (no, really) and b) French kids would rather celebrate their birthday than their saint's day because Facebook doesn't do reminders for upcoming saints' days.

When I first received the diary, I was rather annoyed because all of the other members of my nuclear family had their own jour de fête but I didn't--Bexquisite isn't a particularly traditional French name, even though it is pronounced with a French accent and stress (behks-kwih-'ZEET). "Ne'er mind," sez I, "I bet I've got a really awesome saint to celebrate on my birthday." Not quite. Not only had I never heard of St Sidoine but, worse, he was a man--the last straw for a tomboy. According to the French Wikipedia [my translation]

St Sidoine was born in England Britian The UK Ireland or Scotland in the 7th Century. He was captured by Jack Sparrow and Co. and sold as a slave to the monks of l'Abbaye de Jumbo Mumbo--nice lads that they were, they often bought slaves just so they could set them free or guilt trip them into a lifetime of servitude, as was the case here. Sid decided to stay at the monastery and become a monk under the "spiritual direction" of Philibert de Turn-Us. Later, he and his mate Wilfred Owen went to Rome to stock up on Limoncello and buy a new Vespa. On his return, he was made abbot of a monastery near Rouen instead, which was, malheureusement, destroyed by vikings in the 9th century--oh noes. 1200 years later, this event was parodied by the British English rock band Supergrass in their fifth album, The Road to Rouen, and his canonisation followed soon afterwards.

It's funny; I could have sworn that the life of St Sidoine wasn't that interesting when I first looked him up. Then again, that was long before the days of Wikipedia.

A Far from Black and White Film

As predicted, the weather was so awful today that my run ended up being more reminiscent of boot camp: I was soaked through within minutes and then spent the next eighty minutes falling into puddles, jumping over bike gates to avoid puddles, slipping on piles of sodden leaves, slipping on mud and, more rarely, being splashed by cars. I felt much better after a hot shower but understandably, this experience didn't really leave me pining for the great outdoors--or even for leaving the flat at all.

However, I had booked a ticket for The White Ribbon, somewhat à contrecœur, and in what has been a rather budget-stretched month, I was loath to waste £7 so I dutifully trekked (or, rather, Tubed) down to the BFI to endure Michael Haneke's latest cinematic experience. I say "somewhat à contrecœur" because the other two Haneke films I've seen--Funny Games US and Caché--were immensely frustrating. Haneke spends both films carefully and methodically building up a fascinating mystery and then just leaves the viewers in the lurch at the end. I was really enjoying watching both of these films but the ending, or lack thereof, ruined it for me. I don't absolutely require for all loose ends to be tied up at the end of a film but without at least some explanation for the bizarre events of the film, I came away feeling immensely unsatisfied--anticipation was not the purest form of pleasure on this occasion.

I was expecting more of the same from The White Band, which is set a few months before the outbreak of World War One in a small German village where strange things (tragic "accidents", barn burnings, cabbage mutilation, child torture, and so on) have started to happen. Haneke almost had me at the credits because I was feeling very tired and the opening credits were rolled on one at a time in small, white letters on a black background with no music or sounds at all--I almost fell asleep. Luckily, I soon woke up when the black started to fade away into the stark white backdrop of a man riding on a horse in the countryside--not the only time when the startlingly white background caused me to rub my eyes during the film, which is shot entirely in black and white. The villagers--particularly the children--are mostly Aryan, with their blonde hair looking almost white on film; some always dress entirely in black, some have white aprons, some are made to wear the titular white ribbon to remind them of purity and innocence when their behaviour suggests that they might be in need of a reminder.

The film is narrated by the school teacher (or, given the voice, a much older version of him) in the German village and opens with the village doctor's horse tripping over a wire that has been hung between two trees. The doctor falls and badly hurts himself and is taken to the hospital in a nearby town. Following this, more strange accidents and incidents start occurring and the school teacher tries to get to the bottom of them, while also trying to win the heart--and the hand--of the nanny of the baronial family who employ about half of the village. The children are, for the most part, decidedly creepy--usually, they are Stepford-like with their, "yes, father; no, father" responses and the way they seem to be completely emotionless. Other times, they become very angry and violent. Many of the parents are no better and as the film progresses, we learn more about their true nature.

To some extent, The White Ribbon is more satisfying than Funny Games and Caché, in that while there is a certain amount of open-endedness and ambiguity, we learn enough about the villagers to be able put together some of the pieces and to explain what just happened and why. I still found it a little frustrating because I'd just sat through 2h30 worth of film (and only looked at the time once!) and so I felt I'd earned a little more in the way of resolution. With Haneke, though, this is likely as good as it gets. The movie was gripping throughout with the suspense and the intrigue being upped painstakingly slowly, although I felt that the few humorous or more light-hearted moments in the last hour verged on bathos. The acting was great too, particularly the creepy children. All in all, The White Ribbon was a lot more enjoyable than I was expecting.

"A Pile of Dead Leaves and a Moon the Color of Bone"

Songs for a storm-beaten November night--one where the hatches really need to be battened down and where the sound of the rain pounding on the windows makes you really glad you are tucked up in bed.

1. Late November -- Sandy Denny: "The methods of madness, the pathos and the sadness/God help you all, the insane and wise."

2. November -- Tom Waits: "No prayers for November to linger longer"

3. The Lost Coast -- The Grey Eye Glances: "Later on at the lighthouse/We were warned we should be careful/By waves that shot above us/We were told there was a hurricane/That came ashore each evening"

4. Everybody Knows -- Echo and the Bunnymen: "You're putting the no in November"

5. On the Radio -- Regina Spektor: "And on the radio/You hear November Rain/That solo's awful long/But it's a good refrain"

6. Saying Nothing -- Thea Gilmore: "Here's hoping that you thought to pull your window down cos the/Dogs are still barking Debussey in rounds"

6. Winter -- Joshua Radin: "Thinkin' of winter"

7. Mr November -- The National

A few of these were in my head anyway when I was thinking of November songs--Late November, The Lost Coast (which opens with, "Early November, north of San Francisco"), and Saying Nothing (which begins with, "Enter my November boy/With eyes like the sea"). Others were rediscovered when browsing the iTunes store for songs with November in the title. The rest resurfaced after a tireless search for "November lyrics -Waits -Denny -Wyclef -Guns -Roses."

My ad hoc topic-based playlists are still hugely hampered by iTunes's failure to let me search for words appearing in song lyrics I have tireless entered by hand for several hundred of my favourite songs; nor did a Google search turn up any workarounds, other than a plugin for Macs. Briefly, I considered pasting the lyrics of my favourite songs into the "comments" field in iTunes, which is searchable, but then I discovered that would only allow me to input the first verse or so of most songs, which is no use. Even more briefly, I toyed with the idea of going through my favourite songs (200 of them, say) and adding keywords to the "comments" field. But that would just be madness, clearly...

A Sentimental Education

I've read 164 books so far this year, with just six weeks of reading time remaining. I haven't gone through the full list in detail yet but I have been highlighting a small selection of books as I go, picking out books either for a top-five-of-the-year blog post or to add to my worth-buying-and-adding-to-the-permanent-collection list. Almost all of the highlighted books made me cry--as with movies, I usually prefer my books to be sad and tender rather than flighty and funny.

It's interesting how even a few months of hindsight is long enough for me to change my mind. When I read The Age of Innocence in March or April, it got added to the shortlist but now, while I still like the book a lot, when compared to other books I've read since then, I'm not sure it will still make the final cut. Sometimes my opinion of a book will be tarnished by my disliking of another one of the author's works. I really enjoyed Iain M Banks's Matter when I read it in May or June but having now read Banks's Transition and The Wasp Factory (the latter being by Banks without the M, while the former goes both with the scifi of the with-M alias and the non-scifi non-M alias), my opinion of Matter has now been devalued, simply because I didn't enjoy the two books I read later.

I was somewhat hesitant to take reading suggestions from an economist but Tyler Cowen has good taste in many things so when he recommended a book called A Happy Marriage by Rafael Yglesias on Marginal Revolution back in July, I decided to give it a whirl, based on Cowen's summary:

I devoured this book eagerly on a plane flight and I recommend it highly to those who are married, have been married, will be married, should be married, and should not be married.

I must have stopped reading there because I don't remember reading his next paragraphs about the appearances of bloggers and economists or about the fact that not many other novels contain a tongue-in-cheek explanation of the difference between micro- and macroeconomics.

Of course, the book hasn't been published yet in England and after repeated searches of my library catalogue, all in vain, I gave in and decided to just buy it while I was in the US--a rare occurrence these days for me when a) I read a lot of books, b) I don't necessarily want to own very many of them once I've read them, c) I don't have a lot of money and d) Westminster Libraries have a big enough collection that I can usually satisfy my reading needs with a 50p reservation fee.

At $26 it wasn't cheap either but I think it was a good investment--I will definitely read it again and the cover--leafy trees curving into a sort-of heart shape outside a New York apartment building--is pretty too. As it clocks in at under 400 pages, the book doesn't take up more than its fair share of shelf space either. As for the novel itself, it is a loosely fictionalised account of the author's almost 30-year marriage to Margaret Jostow. The author's name and the name of his sons change in the book, but otherwise many of the details are real. The raw, sensual, tender emotions that fill every word of the text are certainly very real.

The novel opens when Enri que (as Yglesias's alter ego is called) is introduced to Margaret by his friend Bernard. Enrique dropped out of school at 16 to write novels and enjoyed initial success but following his break-up with his much older girlfriend, he is suffering from a big loss of confidence. Margaret is a 24-year-old Cornell graduate and artist. She's beautiful with her big blue eyes and is somewhat socially awkward, which Enrique finds endearing. It's New York City in the early '70s and they are falling in love.

The next chapter flashes 30 years into the future where Margaret is dying of a cancer that invaded her bladder and then the rest of her. The realisation that this young, beautiful nymph has become middle-aged and very ill, though still dry and brave, is a shocking one. With alternating chapters set in the present and then flashing back to tell chronologically the story of their relationship, Yglesias depicts a marriage that is far from perfect and that has its problems as with all others but that, ultimately, is a very happy marriage. The clever structure means that the novel is both building up and winding down the relationship at the same time and it's only at the very end of the book that Margaret and Enrique have sex (structurally though not, of course, chronologically), as though their relationship is so deep and so intense and so all-consuming that readers could only hope to understand the power of this consummation after knowing their full story and how it ends.

As present-day Margaret begins to say her goodbyes to friends and family, the present-day chapters become harder and harder to read. While Margaret's impending death is very sad, it is the knowledge that Enrique will soon have to deal with the death of the love of his life that is particularly devastating. And yes, I did cry, although not until the final chapter, even though you have been well primed to expect the things that happen in the last chapter all along. Yet, the ending is still emotional and tense, suspenseful and lyrical, and is a fitting end for a beautiful book.

Superficially, A Happy Marriage is similar to Lynn Barber's An Education--both, ultimately, have the strong, life-long marriage of the protagonist at their centre, even if both deviate onto other topics such as their career, their upbringing and their past loves. Of course, the brusque, sharply witty irony of Barber's prose is a world away from the languorous poetry of Yglesias's writing. I read An Education but A Happy Marriage slipped over me, sucking me in and demanding my attention until it was finished.

It's perhaps unfair for me to add A Happy Marriage to my shortlist of the year when there are only six weeks for me to go off it, but I can't imagine it will enter my chart below number two.

For He Is in Dede Mervelously Frended

Yes, it's that time of year again--the time for WOTYs or should that be Ws OTY or WOTies? Last year, I was singularly unimpressed with the New Oxford American Dictionary's Word of the Year, hypermiling, which I'd never even heard before it was announced. This year's choice, unfriend, pleases me more because a) I know what it means and b) I've heard people using it, even though I'm neither enough of a Facebook power user nor enough of an unfriending bitch to use it much myself. My example sentence would be, "J unfriended me in 2006 and has blocked me on Facebook ever since."

Actually, though, although I wouldn't use the word often myself, instinctively, I find myself drawn more to defriend, which has about half as many Google hits as its more popular synonym unfriend. Linguistically speaking, unfriend is more correct because it combines the Germanic root friend with a Germanic prefix un-, whereas defriend adds the Latinate prefix de- with the Germanic root. Historically, this affix mixing is very rare: Germanic happy takes Germanic un-, whereas Latinate satisfied takes Latinate dis-. There are some exceptions, of course, and when new words enter the language, there isn't always an obvious affix for them to take--or, indeed, a universal affix for them to take, as evidenced by de-/unfriend.

My second objection was to the use of friend as a verb. "OMG, my dad tried to friend me at the weekend; ewww." Again, though, my gripe is unfounded because the OED records texts using friend as a verb as early as the 13th century. A later example comes from Robert Dudley, my favourite historical character, in 1585, "Yf the man be as he now semeth, hit were petty to loose him, for he is in dede mervelously frended."

Thirdly, if I'm going to accept friend as a verb, I prefer the prefix de- because it makes it clear that defriend is a verb, given that de- is only applied to verbs and their derivatives. Un-, meanwhile, can negate, reverse or counter-balance many parts of speech: unexciting (adj), undo (v), unease (n), unkissed (compound adj., a favourite of Mr Hector's) and so on. Unfriend could theoretically mean "remove from your social network" or something like "an enemy," albeit only in some sort of Orwellian world where Newspeak is the official language.

In conclusion, I can't find any serious objection to defriend, other than an instinctive dislike of its form, so I'll concede it is at least a better WOTY than many of its predecessors. Perhaps I'm just jealous that ToCoRo and NoMaRo still haven't got quite as much pick-up as they deserve...

In Search of the Perfect Silver Screen

I really do try to patronise independent cinemas wherever possible. The experience is far more pleasurable than the awful, over-sized multiplexes even if the tickets are more expensive. In theory, at least. Recently, though, my indie cinema trips have tended to have little irritations that have if not ruined the film then distracted me from enjoying it as much as I would have otherwise. Perhaps I've been spoiled by going to the BFI so much, which is always great because everyone--staff and the audience--loves films. Perhaps I just go to the cinema more often and so start to notice little quirks that might not have caught my attention otherwise, just like the way at least one train journey I make per week, now that I commute, will have some annoyance--the electric doors between the first class carriage and pleb class might open and shut every five seconds for the whole journey, for example.

1. No Hable con Ella, por favor. It's not as bad as in France yet, I'll admit that, but almost every other time I go to the Screen on Baker Street, I will find myself sitting next to a foreign couple who will spend the whole film talking or muttering to each other. On Friday, for example, a middle-aged, European couple were sitting next to me. Every two minutes or so the man would let out a series of grunts, often with an associated hand gesture, while his wife would then chatter away quickly though more quietly. I assume he was asking what had happened in a scene and she was trying to explain but then sometimes, his grunts seemed to be more critical as though he were questioning why a character had said a certain line or done something a certain way. I was too English to say anything but the Aussie girls in the row in front turned round, about halfway through, and asked them to be quiet. They did. For about five minutes and then the muttering started again. The Aussies tried again a couple of times and then gave up but did shout at the couple when leaving telling them to watch a DVD next time so they didn't spoil the film for others although the couple pretended not to understand. It made me feel a bit better though. Of course, this isn't the cinema's fault and Baker Street does have a large international population but perhaps the Screen could put up a multilingual sign explaining that people come to the cinema here to watch a film and not to chat.

2. Bright Lights, Big City. When allowing customers to book tickets online, cinemas should really include information about any major obstructions of the screen and potential interference from "emergency lighting" when making the screen plans available. The Screen on Baker Street failed again on this recently. As I visit fairly often, I have my favourite seats and favourite rows in each screen. Sadly, as I was booking late a few weeks ago, most of the good seats were taken. "Please note that you are not able to leave a single seat gap between your seats and the end of the row or seats already sold," the website advised. For some reason, though, someone else's booking had left a lone seat at the end of the row and I was getting an error message coming up when I tried to book it. Fail. This meant I had to sit in the row behind, which would have been OK had it not been for the horribly bright emergency light that was inserted into the seat across the aisle, which was very unpleasant for someone who gets migraines or who isn't expecting the Spanish Inquisition. After the trailers, when the ice cream guys (see below) came round, they asked if anyone else wanted anything and I asked if they could turn the light off but of course they can't.

This isn't the only cinema where poorly placed emergency lighting has detracted from my cinematic experience. I'm not saying they shouldn't have emergency lights, but cinema owners should actually test out potential lighting positions by sitting in each of the seats to test for distracting and painful glare before fixing the lights permanently.

3. I Scream. You rush to get to the cinema on time because you know the Grumpy Old Women will tut at you if you dare to ask if you can squeeze past them after the adverts have begun (unsurprisingly, the GOW sitting next to me on Friday was pretty late herself and had to squeeze past everyone and then made a huge fuss when the chatty foreign couple needed to get in a couple of minutes later). Then you endure ten minutes of adverts and five of trailers (which aren't so bad) as well as whichever tired, old Orange commerciadvisory reminding you to switch your phone off. Finally, you think, it's time for the film. But then the lights come on and for a few minutes nothing happened.

The first time this happened, I assumed it was due to a technical glitch, like at the Finchley Road Odeon, but then a couple of minutes later, two ushers came in asking if anyone wanted to buy ice cream. At first, I thought they were filling in the time until the film was actually ready to go but it's happened every time since at the Screen on Baker Street. Of course, cinemas make far more money from the food and drinks they sell than from ticket sales and while the Screen has nice, posh snacks, I rarely buy them because they are expensive. The post-trailer but pre-film ice cream sales trick is a good one because the audience is then sitting down comfortably rather than rushing in to get to their seat on time and are more likely to be susceptible to impulse buys (incidentally, in my experience, more women than men go for the last-minute ice cream). Clearly, it's worth it for the cinema--usually six or seven people will buy an ice cream and while I'm not sure what the margins are, it's probably a good boost. For most of the audience, though, it's a pain in the arse--more time spent hanging around waiting for the film.

For all of the above reasons, I don't mind too much that it will cost me £25 to renew my BFI membership (with £10 discount for being an existing member and £5 discount for paying by direct debit). The BFI is a place for cinema lovers who have come to watch a film and doesn't have poorly placed emergency lighting or ice cream breaks (in fact, they don't allow any food in the auditoria, which means no rustling of sweetie wrappers). The tickets are reasonably priced, especially for members, and there's a really nice bar and restaurant on site, which makes it easy to have a great night out there. The only trouble, though, is that they don't show all new releases and so finding another independent cinema that will screen the new films I want to see but which allows me to do so in pleasant conditions. Now there's a mission...

O Bright-Eyed Hope, My Morbid, Fancy Cheer

I thought it was appropriate to spend my last night as a 25-year-old watching a film about a poet who died at the age of 25. What better than to put some perspective on my thankfully un-TB-threatened world, eh? Perhaps it wasn't the happiest way to pass the evening but it was a warm, sensuous, engaging film nonetheless.

Jane Campion's film Bright Star tells the story of the last three years of John Keats's life and of his relationship with Fanny Brawne. In some ways, it's a lot like Love Story: girl meets boy, they fall in love but their differing social statuses keep them apart and in the middle of this struggle, one of them dies young. Bright Star is the same length as Glorious 39 but unlike the fast-paced, tension-filled movie I saw on Thursday, Bright Star is languorously slow, lush and voluptuous. In some ways, Keats's inevitable death isn't enough of a denouement because, while this is tragic, much of the film is spent with Fanny and Keats unable to fully express their love for each other with only short bursts of time when they can be happy together interspersed with their physical and emotional separation. "We've woven a web together," Keats says (approximately), "and while it's attached to the world, it's quite separate from the world."

Fanny's family aren't rich but they are comfortable. She and her widowed mother and younger brother and sister live in a nice enough house with servants and they eventually move into half of the rambling Hampstead estate where Keats also resides, intermittently. Her very sweet mother wants Fanny to be happy but equally thinks that her daughter needs to marry someone better placed to support her than the impoverished poet whose work is, as yet, unacclaimed. Keats's best friend and self-proclaimed protector, Charles Brown, also does his best to keep the pair apart but, of course, to no avail.

What girl could resist a dashing young poet reading her his beautiful poems amid a glorious, bluebell-filled forest? Fanny Brawne certainly couldn't and despite the warnings, plunged right in--to Keats's heart, rather than the Hampstead ponds. The film is, for the most part, gorgeously shot: lush green forests, a room filled with colourful, exotic butterflies, the bright dresses Fanny wears that she has made herself (they may be stylish but they aren't very flattering, although with Abbie Cornish wearing them, that doesn't really matter), and the endless letters oozing love and folded up small so that more words would fall out as they are unfolded. It's always sunny, even in autumn where the sun breaks through the orange leaves.

And then Keats becomes very ill. TB, it seems. This adds a whole new level of difficulty to the relationship between him and Fanny, when their situation was complicated enough anyway. His friends, including Brown, insist that he head south to the warmer climes of Italy, where he might recuperate. This entails a painful goodbye scene in Keats's bedroom where he says he "won't see her again on this earth." Fanny begs him to stay but he can't; his friends have paid his passage, he says, and he can't let them down. Probably, he just didn't want her to watch him fading further and dying. Instead, they slip into their other world and imagine the house they would live in when he returns and the life they would lead.

After he leaves, the film becomes very grey, lifeless and lethargic. No more flowery meadows, no more butterflies, no more laughter. And this heavy sadness continues until Brown breaks the news that Keats has died. Abbie Cornish is brilliant in this scene, her anguished sobs are truly heart-wrenching and she struggles to breathe, perhaps in sympathy with Keats's damaged lungs. After two hours of the relationship building up tantalisingly slowly, it ends rather suddenly with Fanny walking out alone into the snow. Monochrome again. None of the loud, cheerful music of the opening sequence. Just silence. And the end.

Not a happy film but a bright one with the richness and sensory detail contrasting with the air of wistfulness, regret and despair that is usually hovering in the background. Both Abbie Cornish and Ben Whishaw, who plays Keats, portray the characters sensitively and warmly. And on a windy, rainy Friday night, Bright Star r.

Glorious but Grim

All of the fuss last night to get to the BFI in time for the Glorious 39 preview was worth it in the end, even if the people sitting next to me in the cinema may not have agreed (the man next to me and the woman directly behind me both had awful, hacking coughs, though, so I don't feel too bad). Even though the film was aired as part of LoFiFest, the screen was still fully packed--for once I couldn't see any spare seats. After a ten-year absence from the big screen, the world was obviously keen to see Stephen Poliakoff's return to the director's chair.

I hadn't really heard of Poliakoff when I booked my ticket to the preview--a family drama/thriller set at the break of World War II, that glorious summer of '39, and with Billy Nighy, Jeremy Northam, Romola Garai and other interesting actors seemed like my kind of film. And I was right. In fact, this was exactly the kind of movie I hoped the LoFiFest surprise film would be: by turns chilling and thrilling, the audience is never allowed to breathe easily for long enough to get too sentimental, but Garai's excellent acting does make for a very sympathetic female lead.

After an opening scene with three siblings, in their teens, frolicking amid a ruined castle while Adrian Johnston's haunting music leads us to believe that all is not as well as it might seem. Flash forward to the present day and a 20-something named Michael shows up at a flat near St Paul's Cathedral to meet two men--septuagenarian brothers Walter and (I think) Oliver--who he says are his cousins (actually, as the cousins of his grandmother, they are really his first cousins twice removed, but that's not important). He's studying history--specifically his family history--and wants to know more about his grandmother Celia and her older sister Anne. Apparently, Walter and Oliver are the last ones left of that generation. After some fiddling around with an old wireless (with the bells of St Paul's still ringing loudly in the background), the brothers begin to tell their tale...

Flashback to the summer of '39. It is a most glorious summer for the three children of Sir Alexander Keyes, a popular Tory MP played by Bill Nighy. Ralph works for the Foreign Office and has a habit of calling his sister "Glorious." Celia, the youngest, seems to be jealous of her older sister Anne who, tall, cool and blonde, stands apart from her siblings both because she is adopted and because she's an actress, which means they all talk down to her quite a lot. Nonetheless, life is idyllic as they have fun in their rambling Norfolk estate and London townhouse with beloved cats in both homes. Initially, there seems to be some tension because Anne seems to be Sir Alexander's favourite--she reads Keats to him in the evenings to help him relax. As for the mother, she's not all there and spends much of her time gardening without much interest in her family.

The summer of '39 isn't just any summer, however, and before long, luscious balls and champagne-filled parties are replaced by something entirely different--something a lot more sinister. After a birthday lunch for Sir Alexander with Anne's boyfriend Lawrence, who works for the Foreign Office, as well as the malevolent Balcombe (played uncharacteristically by Jeremy Northam) and Hector (David Tennant). The discussion turns briefly to politics--more specifically the potential outbreak of war against Germany--and Hector makes it clear that he strongly disagrees with those who feel that a policy of appeasement towards Hitler would be the only way to avoid Britain being dragged into a war that would jeopardise their really quite comfortable lives.

This objection is duly noted by Balcombe and then a few days later, Hector is found dead--apparently a suicide. At this point, Anne, disturbed by Hector's death, starts getting suspicious and wants to find out more about what happened. Coincidentally, while rescuing a cat from one of the out-of-bounds outhouses at her estate, she finds a stack of old gramophone records among the boxes of documents. When she listens, though, it isn't a foxtrot that plays but a conversation between several men (one of whom is Balcombe) who are obviously referring to some kind of plot and also about whether a death (clearly Hector's) had been taken care of. Sir Alexander denies all knowledge of the disc, saying that it was Balcombe's and that he would make sure all of Balcombe's things were removed from their property and that he wouldn't let Balcombe trouble her again.

The more Anne investigates, more shocking her discoveries become. Strange things start happening to her too--a baby (Oliver) supposedly under her care disappears and then shows up a mile away in his buggy, but is Anne going mad or are they really out to get her? Her position as an adopted child further tests her trust in her family who seem more removed from her than ever. As preparations for war go ahead--pets are put down and then burned en masse on large, Holocaust-like bonfires, giant, silver barrage balloons are inflated and slip past over the parkland like invading robots, children are evacuated--both the country as a whole and Anne are pushed to breaking point as they try to do the right thing. Whatever that may be.

The "what if?" topic of the film is a familiar one but one not often taught in school history classes. What if TPTB in Britain had given in to some of Hitler's demands to avoid war in this country--at any cost? My GCSE history course focused on World War One, Germany and Russia up until 1939 and then the Korean War and Cold War--everything but the Second World War. Poliakoff, along with Romola Garai and Bill Nighy, was also present at the screening to answer questions, and he made it clear that this topic is also dear to him. He mentioned several times that his Jewish family's life would have been very different if Britain had given in to Hitler and what a close-run thing it was--the Holocaust imagery throughout the film was very much a conscious decision.

There weren't many audience questions for Garai and Nighy, which is a shame as they both did a really great job in the film and I would have been interested to hear more from them (not that I had any inspired questions myself). Nighy's character manages to be loving and utterly devoted to his family--and especially to Anne--and yet throughout, exuded an eeriness, which I never really shook off. Anne, meanwhile, is tall and blonde, apparently fragile yet tough deep down--the perfect Hitchcockian heroine, as one audience member said. I enjoyed the character's ambiguity--not knowing until a few minutes from the end whether there was a big conspiracy against her. As for working with Poliakoff, someone asked Garai whether the script for the film was set in stone or whether she could make suggestions or improvisations. Constantly stressing her "inexperience," Garai explained that you couldn't change anything in the script because it all fitted together perfectly as it was and Poliakoff had a response ready for every proposed change. Both she and Nighy gained a lot from the four weeks of rehearsals, more common in theatrical productions than in films.

All in all, the film got a big thumbs up from me: with a gripping plot, great acting and interesting historical themes, you can't really go wrong. At least not with that cast and that director. In fact, the only problem was that we were told at the beginning of the Q&A not to take photos because it was distracting. I took a sneaky one anyway with my iPhone when the questions had finished (and when I would no longer distract them), but it didn't come out very well.

La Joie de [ʒ]

It goes to show that you can learn something even from the trashiest of novels. The second-hand bookshop along my road has a habit of dumping Jilly Cooper novels on the £1 trolley outside the shop and, as Westminster Libraries are currently letting me down with all of the books I want to read involving a wait of at least a week, I have given into temptation. The latest involves a (stunningly pretty, of course) world-famous violinist who turns her hand (so to speak) to the "male-dominated world of conducting" after a botched suicide attempt leaves her without a very functional left hand. I have learnt a little about symphony orchestras but the most crucial thing was how to spell my favourite phoneme.

[ʒ] is the sound you hear in the middle of the word pleasure or the beginning of the French word joie--it's the gorgeous, sensual sound that is technically known as a voiced palato-alveolar fricative but that's not very catchy. You get a lot of them in French thanks to the two waves of palatalisation, which took place in the language in the second to third (first wave) and fifth to ninth (second wave) centuries. In the first wave, the hard Latin [k] and [g] sounds (as in the beginning of English cat and gob), when pronounced before [e] and [i], gradually came to be articulated further forward in the mouth, near the palate, in anticipation of the vowels, producing the sounds [t'] and [d'], which became [ts] and [dʒ] (as in pretzel and ridge) and, later, [ʃ] (shh) and [ʒ] (pleasure). This is how you get the soft palatal sound at the beginning of the French word gens from the hard [g] at the start of the original Latin gentem. In the second wave, a similar series of changes took place in words where [k] and [g] were followed by [a], which is how the French jambe with the soft [ʒ] comes from the hard Vulgar Latin gambam.

In English, of course, it depends at which stage we borrowed the word from French as to whether the sounds are unpalatalised (as in cat rather than the palatalised French chat), palatalised but with the pretzel/ridge sounds (as in chamber (vs the French chambre), which comes from the Latin camera), or palatalised with the shh/pleasure sounds (as in siege).

Nonetheless, [ʒ] is, sadly, quite rare in English and certainly doesn't merit its own letter in our over-crowded alphabet. Quite often, however, I need to use it in writing to make clear what I mean. For example, I often want to transcribe a shortened form of usual to [u:ʒ], which I often use in colloquial speech. But how? Writing use could easily become confused with the word use, us' is similarly no good and usu' is a vowel too far. However, in Jilly's book, one of the characters uses the word caszh, which is clearly a shortened form of casual which has the same palatal sound in the middle as usual.

It's quite a clever solution, really, given that in French phrasebooks, the sound is often given as [zh] in the transcription for English people. It annoys me a little because "z" and "h" don't really bare any resemblance to the sound but then, when has the English alphabet ever fitted the sounds in our language (actually, there was a pretty good fit in the 12th century)? In an ideal world, of course, I would switch over to IPA when I wanted to make myself clear but it's likely that only the rare species Alumnus linguisticus would really understand. Perhaps the only solution is to move to France where [ʒ] is business as uszh.

Autumn Tactics

Running in the autumn is so lovely that on a bright day, even the industrial wastelands of Acton, alongside the canal, look gorgeous in the afternoon sunshine with the rich organges, yellows and reds of the leaves detracting and distracting from the dull greys of the endless tire factories and warehouses along the Grand Union Canal.

Today, I made it as far as the Grand Junction Arms pub in Harlesden (which is pretty close to Ikea, in case I ever have the need or desire to buy a large, flat-pack product and run for six miles with it back home) before deciding that in order to get home before the light started to fade--and to able to nip to Selfridges for emergency Nespresso supplies--I would need to turn back. The further west I ran, the more deserted the towpath became, hence my desire to get home long before dark, as well as my apparent need to get some flashing lights to attach to myself now that winter is approaching even faster than I can run away from it.

It's a pleasant route along the canal--a short jog up the road to get to the towpath and then running on the road while the canal goes under the tunnel in Maida Vale. Next it's through the swanky mansions of Little Venice, which look pretty nice at this time of year, and then out under the A40, through the northern extremes of Westbourne Grove and Notting Hill and then into the less populated parts, which alternate between aforementioned industrial wasteland and gorgeous, countryside-esque, autumnal waterway, with the odd canal-side supermarket and pub thrown in for good measure.

Since my recent discovery that my iPhone fits--just--inside the pocket on my leggings, I've been taking it out running with me instead of the Shuffle. This means not only that I know what time it is and approximately how long I've been running, but I can also listen to other music if I run out of podcasts (and the podcasts sync automatically from my computer without me needing to download manually), find my location in Google Maps and take photos. Thus far, the photos have mainly been of a point-and-click nature as I didn't want to break up my running, not that the iPhone is a top camera but it does well enough outdoors.

Following my decision to at least enter the lottery for a place in next year's New York Marathon, I realised that the approximate times and distances I've been calculating based on post-hoc Google Mapping and length of podcasts aren't going to be an adequate training tool so I've bought a Nike + iPhone sensor, which I can attach to my shoe and which will track all sorts of details about each run I do and sync it to the Nike website. This is potentially dangerous for someone who likes stats and metadata and self-competition, but hopefully it will also be useful.

Not Just Another Brick in the Wall

If Pink Floyd had existed in 1961, 16-year-old Jenny Mellor, the protagonist of Lone Scherfig's film, An Education, who wants to read English at Oxford and who has a habit of slipping into French, mid-conversation, would probably have sung, "On n'a pas besoin d'éducation." However, in French l'éducation really refers to one's upbringing rather anything one might be taught in school whereas in English, the word can mean either and the interactions, overlap and conflicts between the two is a key theme in this film. Interestingly, the French title has remained close to the original title with, Une Education, which loses a lot, in my opinion.

Jenny (played by Carey Mulligan) is the only really bright girl at her expensive private school and is the envy of her friends and delight of her teachers. However, it's 1961 and she lives in Twickenham with her well-meaning but seriously misguided parents and life is dull. Her father Jack, played by Alfred Molina, is desperate for her to go to Oxford but for all the wrong reasons and for him, Jenny's life is all about ticking off various boxes for the Oxford application form. Her mother is more sympathetic and wants Jenny to have a better life than she did but won't stand up to her husband. Jenny's wussy sort-of boyfriend Graham comes round for tea and gets slaughtered by Jack for being Jewish and for not knowing what he wants to do with his life, other than vague plans to go travelling. Error.

Enter David, an arguably charismatic 30-something played by Peter Sarsgaard who charms his way first into Jenny's life and then into that of her parents. It's obvious from the start just how naive her parents are--he has her mother wrapped around his little finger from the second he pulls out the old, "I didn't know Jenny had a sister" line. Her father takes a little more coaxing--what do you mean you want to take my 16-year-old daughter to a concert/Oxford/Paris?--but soon gives in when he decides that David could be just what Jenny needs. After all, he only wants her to go to Oxford so she can meet a nice and (more importantly) rich bloke and not have to worry about working ever again.

And to Jenny, David and his friends Daniel and Helen (played by Dominic Cooper and Rosamund Pike, who does a great job of playing the dumb blonde ("but in 50 years no one will speak Latin anyway, not even Latin people," she says to console Jenny who just got a B in her A-level Latin mock)) are infinitely glamorous and exciting. They wear nice clothes, go to nice restaurants, go out dancing and to listen to music and to races. They know how to have fun. They also know how to deceive and to steal as Jenny soon discovers after David and Daniel leave an old country house with an old and rare framed map, which they were really "liberating" from its former little old lady owner.

After the initial shock at this revelation, Jenny decides she doesn't care about--or that she won't think about--her boyfriend's wicked ways. It doesn't occur to her that if he's been lying to her about what he does for a living, he might be lying to her about other things. Actually, he does a very good job of avoiding lying to her but there are plenty of big, fat lies of omission, which are revealed later on and she consciously allows him to deceive her parents by telling them they'll be going to Paris with his "Aunt" Helen and that David went to Oxford and studied with C.S. Lewis. But as her parents are actively supporting the relationship--so much so that they encourage her to drop out of school when David asks her to marry him--she has no reason to be wary or afraid, despite the efforts of her English teacher and the headteacher, played by a prim and stern Emma Thompson, to persuade her to stay at school, go to Oxford and get an education in the traditional sense of the world.

Inevitably, it all goes a bit pear-shaped when Jenny discovers a letter addressed to "Mr and Mrs Goldman" in David's car and she has to try to get her life on track. As Jenny is based on Lynn Barber's real-life memoirs, though, you know that she goes to Oxford, meets the love of her life to whom she was married for over 30 years and goes to have a successful career at Penthouse and, over the years, most British national newspapers, so it's hard to be too upset for her. The events of the film An Education form only one chapter of Barber's memoirs, although clearly an important one. One thing that comes across in the book a lot more than in the film is just how bitter Barber was about her parents' failure to protect her from the conman (named 'Simon' in the book, although that wasn't his real name either; confusingly, David was the name of Barber's real-life husband)--in that sense, they didn't give her a very good éducation in the French sense, which Barber attributes to them being first-generation immigrants to the middle classes.

Still, the film was engaging and sweet with a number of very funny lines (and not just those uttered with perfect deadpan delivery by Rosamund Pike) to break up the sappier moments. The acting was particularly good with Carey Mulligan, of course, standing out, and Alfred Molina and Olivia Williams (who plays the English teacher) also doing a great job. Of course, both Jenny, who wants to have fun and go to Paris and hang out with dumb rich people, and her headmistress, who thinks Jenny should do hard, boring things like studying and then become a teacher or a civil servant because she has Potential, turn out to be right: I can't imagine Lynn Barber regrets retaking her A-levels and going to university and yet would her educational experiences--and her life after university--have been quite so interesting had she never met the conman and enjoyed two years of glamour, richness and excitement? Probably not.

Remembrance of Fireworks Past

My recent trip to NYC left me so temporally challenged that I barely even realised it was November and certainly only realised that Thursday this week was Bonfire Night when someone sent an email about the fireworks display in Nowheresville on Tuesday. I wasn't in Nowheresville today so that was out. I had thought about heading up to Primrose Hill as based on my positive experience on New Year's Eve, I thought there would be some local people letting off fireworks as well as the view over grander displays in the city. Unfortunately, it seems that there wouldn't be a display there and--worse--that the police would be there to ensure that no one was breaking the regulations against setting off fireworks in the royal parks.

In the end, I went running instead but while I heard a lot of bangs, I didn't get much of a view on my regular Regent's Park route. This is probably for the best because I would probably have been disappointed anyway. One of the pitfalls of attending a Cambridge college May Ball (especially if it's St Jocks') is that no other fireworks display can ever hope to measure up. In honour of Guy, though, here are my top five firework experiences:

1. The St Jocks' May Ball (2003-6). I attended my college's ball all four years I was there and the weather was pretty good for all but the last. Even then, sheltering from the rain in R's bathroom, which was at the top of one of the turrets and offered an excellent view of the display, made for a memorable experience. As for the other years, the displays were incredibly impressive--marred only by the use of music in some of the later ones. Clichéd music like the William Tell Overture too. The fireworks themselves, though, were brilliantly choreographed and went on and on, growing ever more dramatic until the big finale. In fact, the only real problem was that I wasn't very good at taking photos of fireworks back then--not that I'm much better now--so this image from the St Jocks' Ball in 2005 doesn't really capture the experience very well.

2. Cannes (2009). The stretch of the Mediterranean coast from Palm Beach to Théoule-sur-Mer, which includes Cannes manages to be dramatic and glamorous, often simultaneously. During the summer, there are huge fireworks displays once a week, each one hosted by a different European nation. The fireworks are let off from a boat and the fancy hotels even deign to turn off their lights for the duration of the show. You can pay many, many euros to eat in one of the beach-restaurants and watch the display right from your table (or your sun-bed if you'd rather just drink) or you can make like a local and head for the rocks at the Palm Beach end of the bay, take a picnic and enjoy the entertainment for free. This is what we did this summer. I only saw the Spanish posse's entry but it was pretty spectacular--it was also nice to be outside and watching fireworks at 10 p.m. without freezing to death. Watching the twinkling lights in the hills and in the armada of yachts in the harbour only added to the magic.

3. Lewes (2004). Among other things, the town of Lewes is famous for its very high pubs:residents ratio and its former residents Thomas Paine, Virginia Woolf and Arthur Conan Doyle. Anne of Cleves had a house there, although I don't think she ever visited. Lewes also has pretty special Bonfire Night celebrations, with a torch-lit parade through the centre of town, past many of the pubs. Members of the six bonfire societies then split off to different nearby locations for their own bonfire and fireworks display. Each year, a different effigy is burned--the year I went, everyone was burning parking meters (because of the new meters in place on Lewes High Street), but various local hate figures have also fallen victim to this. The fireworks themselves weren't overly impressive but the atmosphere was great and it was a really fun night.

4. Times Square, New York (2003). On New Year's Eve, 2003, I was in New York and was lucky enough to have really great tickets to see the Broadway production of The Producers, with Matthew Broderick and Nathan Lane and with a one-night-only cameo from Mel Brooks. Getting to the theatre was a complete nightmare with a number of roads already being fenced off. When we got out, though, it was only just over an hour until midnight so we decided to stay and watch the fireworks. Again, the fireworks themselves were fine but nothing special but the atmosphere was fantastic: frenetic, chaotic, excited, exhilarated--all of the things you normally associate with New York. Another year (I forget which), we spent post-theatre New Year's Eve on Brooklyn Bridge watching fireworks go off on all sides--that was fun too.

5. The Shire (1989-1998). As Papa's birthday is just before Bonfire Night, we always used to have a big party at our house on the closest Saturday. Well, not really a big party but four or five lots of family friends would come and we enfants terribles would get to stay up really late playing computer games, eating hot dogs (veggie hot dogs from 1992 onwards) and playing with sparklers. Naturally, as the fireworks were let off by the dads, they weren't hugely impressive but that didn't matter. It was still exciting when a big rocket went off or a Catherine wheel fell off the tree and started spinning in a threatening manner on the ground. BBQ + fireworks + good friends = young Bex bliss. One year (possibly the year we moved from London) we went to the village fireworks display instead. This was a big error as I got a spark from the bonfire in my eye and spent much of the night in A&E. Since then, I've been somewhat wary of bonfires.

Honourable mention: Wales (1999). I wasn't exactly thrilled when my parents dragged my 16-year-old self to a cottage in the middle of nowhere in North Wales to spend New Millennium Eve, especially when there was a really huge house party going on back home that was attended by all of my friends. Still, to Penmaenpool we went and, deprived of friends, shops and the internet, I was forced to go walking and hang out with my family. I wasn't impressed and told them I'd rather revise for my GCSE mocks. What a rebel. Anyway, for their birthdays the month before, my parents had been given this super-powerful firework rocket, which, when launched, was sure to cause a great amount of light, sound and general destruction. Just before midnight, we found an empty field next to the estuary and prepared for the lighting. The lights in all of the visible houses were off so obviously the residents of this exciting corner of the world had already gone to bed. I was concerned that the acoustics would cause the predicted huge noise to echo and amplify.

I shouldn't have worried... At ten seconds to midnight, the touch paper was lit and we all ran back, cowering away from what was surely going to be the loudest, most impressive firework ever. Unfortunately, for whatever reason, it either wouldn't light or didn't launch. Not at all. It didn't emit one bit of sound or light. I haven't forgiven Wales yet--for either disappointment.

Notes from the Underground

On Sunday afternoon at about 4.15, I knew I had only 90 minutes left in New York before it was time to meet the car to go back to the airport. I was just south of Central Park and wanted to head down to SoHo for one last cruise of my favourite shops. I made the mistake of heading for the nearest subway station, which was served only by the F train on the orange line, instead of going one block west to a bigger station with several different trains passing through. I ended up waiting 20 minutes for a train, costing me valuable shopping minutes. On the way back, though, I went to Prince Street station and got on a yellow N train. The clock was ticking and I was in danger of being late but then we got to Union Square and I saw a Q train across the platform and immediately sprinted onto it. The yellow Q train covers much the same ground as the N but only stops at the bigger stations, thus allowing me to yomp up to 57th Street in no time at all, and I realised that the New York subway wasn't quite so bad after all. Here's how it measures up to the Tube:

1. Price. Sure, the Subway's cheaper but as tickets have just gone up to $2.25 (a fact I only discovered after wondering how the hell my MetroCard had run out of credit when there should have been at least $2 left), it's not much cheaper than the Tube any more, especially if you have an Oyster card. [Subway 3/5, Tube 1/5]

2. Ease of use. The first time I ever went on the Subway, I was 11 and with Maman and the Bro and we ended up going to the Bronx instead of Brooklyn--not my fault, of course. Since then, though, I've got much better at Subway navigation. Sure, it takes a little longer to grasp the fact that there are trains with different letters and numbers that go to and stop at different places but which are on the same colour line, not to mention the existence of express trains (see below), but once you know the basic rules, you should be fine. The Tube, on the other hand, does have a 1:1 relationship between lines and colours but then the Tube lines also branch at the ends and perhaps it would be less confusing if the Metropolitan Line had the A for Amersham train, the C for Cheshunt train and the W for Watford train. Also, Manhattan's long, thin shape means that even if the map isn't to scale, you still know approximately where you will pop up when you leave the Subway; objects in the Tube map are not closer than they appear. Then again, the Subway does have stations that pretend to changeovers (such as the biggies like Union Square/14 St and 34 St/Penn Station/Herald Square), which really are separate stations vaguely linked through miles of walkways, which makes the changeover from the Piccadilly to the Jubilee Line at Green Park look like a piece of cake. Finally, Oyster cards make life so much easier; New York really needs them. [Subway 2/5, Tube 4/5]

3. Reliability. Yes, the Subway gets points for its 24-hour service but let's face it: how many times have I ever wanted to get a Tube between 1 and 6 a.m.? Zero. On the other hand, how many times have I stood waiting on a New York Subway platform at a reasonably civilised hour and had to wait 15 minutes or more for a train? A lot. And in London, most platforms tell you at what times the next three trains will be arriving; I only saw this on the L train to Williamsburg on the Subway. Then again, at the weekends, the Tube is a mess with several big lines being completely or mostly closed. The Subway also has weekend closures but they simply cancel the express trains and make all trains stop at all the stations on a line. [Subway 2/5, Tube 2/5]

3. Speed. Some lines in New York are clearly not well served. However, this is made up by the incredibly useful idea of having express trains--trains on a particular line that will only stop at the biggest, most important stops and speed right through the others. If you want to get from 96th Street on the Upper West Side (which I did when staying at a hostel there) to Chambers Street in Tribeca, you can get an express train on the red line and be there in just five stops while the local train on the same line makes 15. Given that I take an express train from London to Nowheresville most days, I am definitely in favour of the Tube implementing express trains--the Circle Line Express could just call at Paddington, Baker Street, King's Cross and Liverpool Street along the top of the circle, for example, and save me valuable minutes in bed. You can also use express Subway trains even if you're not getting off at an express stop by running across the platform when you see an express train waiting and then transfer back once you've yomped. The Subway does lose points for being generally a bit slow and less frequent than the Tube, however. [Subway 4/5, Tube 2/5

4. Character. Now, while Subway stations might have names that are helpful in terms of geographically locating oneself within New York, how boring is a station called 77 Street? This is partly due to the fact that New York streets have helpful but boring names--the Paris Metro stations are also named after the street on which the station is located but Paris Streets have much more interesting names, thus there are Metro stops like, Stalingrad, Les Gobelins and (inexplicably my favourite as a child) Châtelet and its sister stations Les Halles and Châtelet-Les Halles. On the Tube, meanwhile, you get Swiss Cottage, Burnt Oak and Chalk Farm, to name but three evocative station names. Most Subway stations are also pretty grim--less so on the Upper East Side and in Midtown, more so down town, but rarely nicer than "dingy." It's true that some Tube stations are also quite grim but then you have the futuristic buzz of the additional glass doors by the tracks at Westminster, the Sherlock Holmes mosaics at Baker Street and the swankiness of Sloane Square. [Subway 2/5, Tube 5/5]

5. Entertainment. Usually, I'm not looking for entertainment on the Tube, especially when I'm commuting. My seven-minute journey gives me time to read Metro, stash it behind a seat and the prepare to leg it to catch my train to Nowheresville and that's fine. On the Subway, however, there is no Metro (not at the times I travel on it anyway) but there is still plenty of entertainment because the people have such wonderfully random--and loud--conversations. From the mouth of a well-dressed, 40-something blonde woman as she exited the Subway train on Friday, "And then I drew a penis. And I was, like, what? That's, like, so ew!" I assume she was describing a session with her therapist. "I only dress up for the attention," said a 20-something guy wearing only a pair of short green hot pants, a cardboard shell, an orange eye mask and a lot of green body make-up, on Saturday (Halloween). No kidding. On the Tube, you might get the occasional beggar; on the Subway, you will be more likely to get a gospel choir performing Oh What a Night or Stand by Me and asking for donations afterwards. I know which I would prefer. [Subway 4/5, Tube 2/5]

Totals: Subway 17/25, Tube 16/25. So, the Subway wins--just. This is probably a shame given that the MTA, which runs the New York Subway, are thinking of hiring Tube staff as consultants to help improve the Subway...

Keeping Tabs on The Tab

The Tab, the new-ish Cambridge University tabloid-style news outlet, hadn't entered my radar until I heard its "Totty" section being mocked on The News Quiz and criticised in most of the rest of the country's papers. I don't particularly have a problem with hot, female Cambridge undergrads getting some of their kit off if they want to and the fuss over this seemed a little excessive. One piece posted on the website today did catch my attention, however: Cambridge vs Bridgeford.

I initially noticed the piece because it was clear from the title that it was going to be about Trinity, ITV's Oxbridge-inspired, OTT cliché fest--a programme which can surely only appeal to Oxbridge students past and present. However, when I read the rest of Charlotte Wu's post, I realised that it bore more than a passing resemblance to a blog post I wrote about the show about a month ago. There are some similarities in the content of my post and the Tab piece, including:

• comments about students discussing break-downs of A-level results and Christian tea parties
• the fact that lowly fresher Charlotte (AKA token Christian)'s lowly room is right next door to the luxurious digs of the Dandelion Club president
• the fact that the token Christian is a bit of a keeno
• shenanigans with hot, Swedish bedders
• references to "the peasants"
• a criticism of the fact that the Dandelion Club wouldn't wear such ugly formal attire all the time

Of course, although a number of people have visited my blog having searched for "Trinity ITV" (or similar), I've no idea whether Ms Wu actually read my post or not. It's not implausible that these content overlaps are coincidental--after all, I am a former Cambridge student and am thus fairly likely to notice similar things about the show as a current Cambridge student would.

However, what isn't on is the fact that the format of the post is clearly borrowed. I based my post on the Daily Intel blog's brilliant Gossip Girl Reality Index posts, which hilariously resume each episode of Gossip Girl while scoring the believability of its contents. Each GG Reality Index post is divided into two sections--the realistic and the surrealistic and/or unbelievable; the realistic section is given a header that summarises a representative realistic part of the episode (e.g. "Realer Than Lord Snooty's Obvious Crush on Sebastian Valmont in Cruel Intentions" in my post) and the unrealistic section highlights a key fake bit (e.g. "Faker than the Warden Allowing DebaucheryFest (AKA the Feast of Fools) Provided that the Jesters "Volunteered" to Be Hazed All Year"). As I was clearly ripping off this format in my post, I made it clear where the idea came from and was careful to include links to the Daily Intel posts.

In a Guardian article criticising The Tab, Rowenna Davis writes, "I'm sure they know that if they spend their final year getting this tabloid off the ground, they'll walk into Rupert Murdoch's office and he'll be salivating to take them on, regardless of whether they've managed to achieve a degree while running the thing." Well, based on Ms Wu's piece, I'm sure this will be the case. After all, the tabloids are the worst culprits when it comes to failing to provide appropriate credits, attributions and sources for their content and, in online versions of stories, providing a link to these sources. By now, I'm certainly used to material I've written in a press release being "borrowed" or lazily rewritten (with the aid of a thesaurus to change some of the words) and given a new title, and used by an assortment of online news outlets. And if professional newspaper men and women are doing it, how can a bunch of students looking to boost their CVs be expected to do otherwise?

How To Drink Coffee in New York

The quick and dirty tip, of course, is don't and yet I survived four days in a reasonably well-caffeinated state so here are some more tips for maximising coffee enjoyment in the Big Apple.

1. Find a good independent coffee shop/espresso bar. Clues include: staff and customers looking like a cross between starving artists and would-be actors, a shiny and very expensive-looking espresso machine on the counter--a Marzocco would be nice--quirky, local-themed art on the walls and furniture that looks a little different to what you might find in your average Starbucks. Also, coffee should be more prominent on the menu than coffee-based or non-coffee drinks like Frappucinos and Frescatinos and vanilla lattes with caramel. Downtown, this is fairly easy, what with Joe (pictured), Jack's Stir Brew, Roasting Plant, 9th Street Espresso and a whole host of other funky, indie purveyors of coffee. In Midtown, however, it's a little trickier, so...

2. Try a Midtown alternative to a good indie coffee shop. Au Bon Pain, a ubiquitous US breakfast-and-luncheria, does a coffee that is about as reliable as Costa in the UK--mediocre is sometimes all you can hope for. A possible safe-ish alternative is a hotel: the Shoreham in particular has a great espresso machine, which is free and available 24 hours a day for residents--as you can imagine, I didn't get much sleep when I stayed there. Then again, the Ritz Carlton had coffee so bad that when The Bro was ordering breakfast during our stay, he said, "I'll hazard a cappuccino," which brings me to point three... A third safe bet is to find one of the Nespresso boutiques in town--there's one in Bloomie's, one on Madison, on the Upper East Side, and one in SoHo.

3. If in doubt, order a macchiato or--preferably--an espresso. You might love a cappuccino in the morning but really, ordering a cappuccino is just asking for trouble. Far safer is the macchiato and--especially--the espresso. American coffee tends to be watered down compared to what you get in the UK, anyway, and often has a muddy aftertaste. With a macchiato, you are likely to get almost as much milk as a cappuccino should have, anyway, and is the best option if you can't stomach an espresso first thing. Also, beware when ordering a double espresso in New York: often, it will have either a single shot of espresso topped up with scalding water or a two shots but with so much water that a regular espresso cup can't come close to holding it all in. At if an espresso is bad, it's not too hard to down it to get the necessary caffeine hit; a bad cappuccino can take an hour to dispose of (30 minutes of cooling time, 30 of drinking, one nasty sip at a time). Of course, if the espresso turns out to be good, ordering a long drink is likely to be a safe bet.

4. Where possible, evoke Grice's maxim of quantity: make your contribution as informative as is required for the current purposes of the exchange; do not make your contribution more informative than is required. While doing a Brooklyn Bridge walk at the weekend, a couple of my parents' friends needed the loo so we nipped in to Barnes and Noble and decided to caffeinate at the same time. Bad idea--B & N coffee shops are all Starbucks-owned. Ordering six coffee beverages and one tea proved to be an ordeal, especially considering that B & N was almost deserted on a drizzly Saturday morning. First, we said too much when ordering two coffees, one white, one black. "What do you mean by white?" asked the large, black woman serving us. Er, with milk? said Maman's friend tentatively, hoping he hadn't just been racist. Incidentally, he ended up with a layer of whipped cream on top of his coffee.

I decided to follow rule #3 and order a macchiato and Papa followed suit. "Two double skinny macchiatos," I said. Five minutes later, I happened to catch sight of the barista with two large cups, attacking what was probably a perfectly good mediocre coffee with whipped cream and caramel sauce. "Er, I said, two macchiatos not caramel macchiatos," I told him. He was not impressed. The moral of the story is be specific (to avoid getting caramel in your macchiato) but not too specific (in Starbucks, you do your own milk so there's no need to tell them how you like your filter coffee).

5. Desperate times... If you really don't want to take your chances when it comes to American coffee, well, there's always ProPlus...

Saving the Date

The clocks went back again last night, which left me temporarily temporally confused--this is the third time in eight days that I'd gained hours, not that I'm complaining. I was, however, worried about my iPhone, which is even more confused than I am. On Saturday morning, my phone alarm went off at 7.39 a.m., as planned, but bizarrely, it was still very dark outside--much darker than on Friday at the same time. Nonetheless, I got up, started hunting for my trainers and turned on my computer to check the temperature. It was only when I saw my laptop was showing the time as 7.45 a.m. that I realised the time was really 7.39 a.m. in the UK and that my phone had reset its time to the UK time (I later discovered this happens whenever I sync the phone with my laptop). I was thus worried that this morning, my phone would automatically change out of daylight savings time, messing up my alarm time so I also set an eight-hour countdown timer just in case.

I was pounding the pavements of Eighth Avenue by seven a.m. (new time) and in Central Park five minutes later. It had been my plan to run the six miles of the full park loop but the set-up for the marathon interfered for this so not only did I have to run anti-clockwise not clockwise (very anti-zen) but I had to make various detours along the way. Still, I ran the three miles of the marathon and then an extra five miles before detouring to Sarabeth's on Central Park South for pancakes with bacon and maple syrup and a great view of the park. So much for early morning virtue... Breakfast and coffee were great though.

After a quick manicure at Bloomie Nails, I headed up to the Frick Collection for some bargain token culcha--Sunday morning is pay what you wish there, which in my case was all my $1 bills (two), and was very good value. After a bit of final midtown shopping, I headed to the 55th Street restaurant where I was meeting my parents and their friends for lunch after one of Maman's friends had finished the marathon. Rendez-vous-ing with her proved more complicated than planned, delaying the lunch, but she was glowing and very excited to have completed her second NYC marathon (and eighth overall). So much so that she convinced me to enter the lottery for a place in next year's NYC marathon. If I get in, then great, and I will be sure to train properly (hey, with the excuse of a guaranteed New York trip next November, how could I refuse?) and if I don't, there's always the year after.

I spent the last few hours in SoHo, double-checking that J. Crew and Lululemon didn't have any further items with which to tempt me and procuring some cupcakes before speeding back up town and to the airport. Now, I wait in the BA Club Lounge, crossing my fingers for an upgrade but without much optimism. There was a huge queue at the First Class check-in, including at least one 20-person entourage of someone important, which means Club and Premium Economy are probably full. Ah well; at least I've got a window seat so some shut eye might be possible.