gibberish

Ria and I went to get her a hair cut this afternoon.

Think it suits her?

I’ve just been sent an update of the Greenferry website . We’ve had a very busy year but the changes to Queensferry have been well worth it. If you’ve been thinking about digging up a bit of your garden, planting some pots or even making some costumes and need some inspiration, have a look at our website www.greenferry.co.uk and you’ll see what can be achieved.

The best bit of all though is the latte and piece of Rocky Road at Picnic coffee shop afterwards. You can sit outside and watch the world go by on the Terrace and be served by some lovely staff, especially our Amy.

Now, I’m off to finish planning the autumn tubs and containers.

At Mary and Alex’ do last night it’s fairly obvious that Charlie was bored out of his skull, don’t you think?

We went to Mary and Alex’ Silver Wedding anniversary bash at Bamboo last night. Great fun it was too.

As you can see from the picture below Mary is clearly still feeling highly attracted toward Alex - even after 25 years.

She’s still, you know, in the mood.

Trouble is; that isn’t Alex kissing her.

“They were young, educated and both virgins on this, their wedding night, and they lived in a time when a conversation about sexual difficulties was plainly impossible.”

The opening line of On Chesil Beach sets the whole book out before you like an expansive, inviting fairway with a distant green inviting triumph or disaster in equal terms.

This is a trip, just as in Atonement, through the crippling static electricity that fucks up common sense in the English class system. A generation on from Atonement (in 1962) it covers familiar ground, the class divide, unspeakable things that need to be spoken, guilt, anxiety and foolishness wrapped up in a comedy of manners. Perhaps this is McEwan’s masterpiece. It’s short and to the point and yet the expanse of descriptive prose that this book crams in, tardis-like, is breathtaking. Barely three pages of dialogue punctuate this book. Instead it is a two-sided insider’s view of how the denoument, inevitably comes to be.

The characters are vivid, believable, kind of likeable (despite their demons) and certainly sympathetic. It is one of McEwans’s great strengths that he can build a range of male and female characters that one understands and likes despite, or because of, their frialties. Not many others are as capable, as often as he is.

The book builds itself around a series of ripsnorting set pieces that, as in every McEwan novel, suddenly and, usually unexpectedly, pull the rug out from his characters’ and his readers’ feet and then sets about explaining why and rebuilding a sense of equilibrium. The letter scene in Atonement obviously springs to mind in this respect as does the unforgettable supermarket scene (see I’m talking in screenplay terms here) in A child in time. Saturday is built around this structure too.

As for the Booker?

He gets my vote every time.

If I was a betting man, and I am.  I’d be placing a few bob on it.

I always moan that I have all sorts of bird feeders in the garden and no birds appear.

But the last couple of mornings I’ve enjoyed my morning cup of tea watching the to-ing and fro-ing of lots of little birds. So I just wanted to remind everyone that as the weather is changing and getting colder, make sure you’re feeding all the little birdies.

I buy my bird food at the wholesalers, Lawson Donaldson, at Calder Road. A 20kg bag of wild bird feed for £9.00 lasts me a year and the two bird feeders were only £5.00. So get yourself along for all your garden paraphanalia before the 31st October as it is closing down.

On briefing my French colleague, Helene, on a job this morning she remarked that she was bumbuzzled by my brief. I thought I’d google her new word and got this…

And you know what…

It’s a real word…

I’m just back from my Queensferry golf weekend in Fife and we played the best golf course I’ve yet to experience.

I was tickled by their “so what” slogan.

Unlucky.

For the record it is more like the world’s 13th best than the 13th oldest.

It is, quite simply, an awesome golf course, and an awesome advertising strategy.

Edinburgh is posh.

That’s a given.

So, if your name is Tony Wood and you want to keep up with the Worrel-Smythleys whatayagonnado?

Nightmare!

Frightful really.

However, help is at hand. There is a simple solution: revert to your Sunday forename and embelish your surname with an unneccesary D.

Woodd is so much posher than Wood darling.

Then open an art gallery in Dundas Street.

Darling, they’ll be simply flocking.

Or flocking simple.

An Edinburgh instituition died recently.

Sad.

There was a major diversion on Edinburgh’s George Street last week.

Unfortunately it was to Australia.

I had a very interesting and educational chat with my buddy, Jim Downie, who’s Flickr site is quite outstanding.

See what I mean below…

We talked photos and he gave me a very wise lesson.

Less is more.

(I should know that.  I’ve been telling my clients that for 20 years.)

So, on his advice, I have savaged my Flickr site (and yes I know I could have gone further, but I did delete 50% of my shots.)  What remains is a better overall quality, but still with some real duffers.

Have a look and let me know if you agree.

“Thanks Mark for your help on this job. I bought you this great book.”

So my friend Ian said to me in late June as he passed me a hard back copy of the above novel. Unknown to me, mainly because it’s American and a first novel by early 30’s Illinoisian Joshua Ferris. It’s had little critical coverage in the UK and that is a great shame because this book is very much worthy of our attention.

It’s set in a Chicago ad agency.

So, I would like it, I’m an adman.

Bollocks.

It has nothing to do with advertising, despite virtually every page of the book being set in this crumbling, despairing, uncreative prison that is called work. What it is, is a book about work. But more than that, it’s about the tribalism that occurs in the workplace. Tribalism that causes a great deal of hurt, but also a great deal of humour. She’s out because she wears the wrong clothes, he’s out because he wrote the wrong headline et al.

But the real clue to its central theme of tribalism comes from the fact that, like the awesome Jeffery Eugenides’ ‘Virgin Suicides’, it is written in the third person plural.

This simple literary device allows the book to be massively judgemental and, on the rare occasion , when it slips into third person , to be desperately personal.

It is funny as hell. It is sad as hell. It is so well observed that it can only have come from the pen of an advertising lifer. Wrong. Joshua Ferris has barely stepped over the threshold of an ad agency in his life.

It essentially captures, like I’ve never read before, the culture of the workplace. The situation is bleak, post Dotcom-boom the ad agency in question is going bust, people all around are dying (hence the title - on two levels) but a “pro bono” cancer campaign is holding the mutinous ranks together. They all know it’s a facade. So do we.

As the book progresses blackness clouds the skies and we don’t know whether to laugh or cry. The answer is…both.

I urge you to buy this book. You will not regret it.

This little taster might get you going…

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But then, it just makes it look wanky.

It is not. Far from it.

A first novelist’s masterpiece and an American writer to join the Frantzen ranks.

Roll on number two.

Talking of the English class system (see Atonement review) has anybody had the misfortune to watch this hideous piece of nauseating snobbery served up as a guide to easy cooking for complete and utter idiots?

The BBC deserves a kicking for allowing this posh tart to serve up posh tarts.

If Nigella said once that this was the “quick” “easy” “lazy” or “fast” way to do something she said it 100 times. I was on the verge of throwing my Mascarpone in Goats cheese, olive and quince at the screen.

Beat it ya fat boot!

(I know…hypocritical.)

Jeana has a different take on express.

Get it from the carry out!

It is the world’s greatest movie site and I’ve written several reviews on it which you can read here if you can be bothered.

What bothers me though is its reskin.

I think it’s becoming less user friendly and overly commercial.

I hope it’s a phase

Having just seen Atonement, maybe it was a bad idea to view this as the second course… because it was a disappointment.

It’s incredibly exciting (if you get incredibly excited by two hours of chases). It has a good, and followable, plot which twists and turns like a Sidewinder on a trampoline, and it has more locations than CSI, but ultimately it left me a bit cold.

Some of the chases, like through the streets and over the rooftops of Tangiers are just plain silly.

Matt Damon and Julia Stiles who is, frankly, absolutely crap and 100% unbelievable as a top level CIA agent are chased by another CIA killing machine who is rutheless and invincible (except for when he has any of the main protagonists within 20 yards ) through a laborynthian backstret only for them ALL to end up in the same house (not just block) simultaneously.

Also, I thought it amusing that the Tangiers police were considerably better at keeping Matt Damon in check than the combined might of the Uber-CIA team that formed the baddies.

Actually, you know what, having written this I’ve just realised…it’s claptrap.

Avoid.

Sorry.

5/10

Atonement is a majestic and moving novel, one of my favourites by one of my favourite authors, so I approached the movie with optimism and trepidation in equal measure.

I need not have worried; it is executed with impeccable taste, brilliantly directed, acted, soundtracked and photographed. Surely it will do some damage at the Oscars.

It’s essentially a caustic attack on the class society in England where the stiff upper lip leads to all sorts of under-the-radar cruelty.

James McAvoy (essentially a bit of a Lady Chatterley’s lover being as he is the housemaid’s son) falls for the toffee-nosed Cecilia Tallis, (Keira Knightley)and, in the process, drives her 13 year old sister into a fit of jealousy that has tragic consequences for McAvoy.

This is magnified when the young Brioney (brilliantly played by Saoirse Ronan) acts as go-between between the aforementioned James McAvoy (now certainly one of Britain’s best actors) and Knightley (who carries the part off more than adequately).

The film is in three acts. The first set in Brideshead Revisited English opulence, the second in Northern France around the D Day landings and containing a 5 minute steadicam tracking shot that takes the breathe away, the third in the suburbs of war torn London.

Each is rendered differently and observed immaculately. In the snobbery of pre-war rural England the tension can be cut with a knife and the language and mannerisms of upper class torpor are fantastically realised.

The war scenes, aside from the amazing tracking shot, are less well executed (budget restrictions methinks) but the ending is deeply satisfying.

Special applause has to be reserved for Dario Mariavrelli’s soundtrack which uses the sound of typewriter keystrokes as a hugely original percussion instrument that adds energy to the whole piece.

Brilliant.

10/10

We saw Hallam Foe this last week in a bid to see our must-see films of the year. We managed to catch ‘Knocked Up’ the week before and, despite a fire alarm and the cinema being evacuated it was a great laugh. I would not recommend taking your 12 year old children to this 15 rated movie which only missed out on an 18 because there wasn’t much nudity.

It had all the rest though! You name it!

It did have the benefit of saving us from explaining to the kids what doggie fashion looks like or how to have sex with a six month pregnant woman.

Anyway, back to Hallam Foe. I was dead excited about this, partly because I love movies set in places you know, in this case Edinburgh. In addition my Uncle Rab had a cameo role in the movie which he carried off with aplomb. I’d heard that Jamie Bell was excellent in it too.

The truth is that it’s an OK movie shot in Edinburgh with an original, but paper-thin story line revolving around a somewhat Oedipal relationship between Jamie Bell and a girl that he falls in love with who closely resembles his dead mother. The fact that most of the movie is an exercise in Edinburgh rooftop voyeurism adds a certain originality and, of course, you’ve no idea how it will end.

Jamie Bell is indeed excellent and largely carries the movie but, in the end it didn’t have enough depth for me and so I can only give it 7 out of 10.

We’re on our way to see ‘Atonement’ now.

Verdict is

Hallam foe 6.5/10 (maybe a 7)

Knocked Up, it shames me to say 8/10 (maybe 8.5)

Ouch. Glad my savings ain’t there!

The whole thing is really a bit scary. The financial markets look fragile, but people say NR has been ‘buying’ business for years so they’ve maybe traded themselves into this position.

I worry about those with a vested interest (like Alistair Darling for instance) telling us there is no risk. Well, you would say that, wouldn’t you?

I, for one, would not be buying that if my money was in there. And I’d be moving my savings out for sure. The media is making NR ‘movers’ look niaive. I don’t think so.

If my mortgage was there, on the other hand, well who cares… But it’s not.

Might take one out though.

Might end up getting a free house.