Films on a Plane

Long haul flights are horrible. There's no other way to put it - it's a long time to be cramped up next to someone with a hideous cold (13 hours to worry about catching something nasty). I can't afford business class, let alone first class, and it takes me all year to pay off the credit card for cattle class, but I live on the other side of the world from half of my family, so needs must...

One thing that makes the trip bearable is watching the films on offer - so this is what I watched on this trip:

Cemetery Junction
dir. Ricky Gervais/ Stephen Merchant

Summer in Reading 1973 (filmed by the looks of things in Bourne End and Maidenhead) is quite pretty, but pretty quiet. It is a world of casual racism, sexism and homophobia. Freddie (Christian Cooke), Bruce (Tom Hughes) and Snork (Jack Doolan) go out at nights boozing, shagging (or trying to) and fighting. The options are to continue with this life; to work (in a factory or selling life insurance) until you retire and die with a wife, family and mortgage en route; or to get out.

The music, politics (starving children in Africa – ‘the government can’t keep the lights on; they can’t keep the streets clean’), and fashion put it in its place – actually, those black polo-necks, high-waisted jeans with buckled belts, leather bomber jackets, wide-lapelled shirts and polished brogues look very classy.

When you have such a privileged background, there is nothing much to rebel against except boredom. Julie (Felicity Jones), the love interest, wants to be a photographer for National Geographic but ‘people from round here don’t do stuff life like that.’ What they do is smoke and sulk because their parents get divorced (which still seems to be a Big Deal) – too scared to break out no matter how much they talk about it. ‘As long as you stay here you’re a big fish in a small pond and you can blame everyone else for holding you back. But you’re no different from everyone else – you’re nothing special.’

There’s some good writing and some great dialogue, and, while he plays Freddie’s dad very well, it’s interesting to see others delivering the lines written by Ricky Gervais (and Stephen Merchant). Ralph Fiennes does straight comedy very well as Julie’s dad, and her mum, Emily Watson, is the new Imelda Staunton with a great line in desperate angst.

Some of the ‘comedy quips’ are similar to those of Ben Elton and Richard Curtis – this is mainly a predictable coming of age tale about leaving the home town, breaking away from the old generation and forging a new and individual lifestyle. The acting and the script elevate it above the run of the mill, but it’s essentially and old story well-told.

Iron Man 2
dir. Jon Favreau

Over-the-top fight scenes and action sequences featuring guns, cars, machines, weaponry and lots of explosions are ten-a-penny, but as we’re talking Robert Downey Jnr. there is still a smattering of humour (one-liners that would take pages to explain and sound lame in the translation) and flawed genius.

Iron-Man’s ego is out of control (‘The suit and I are one’; ‘I am Iron Man’; ‘I have successfully privatised World Peace’) and so is his health – that which is keeping him alive is also killing him and he needs to discover a new element to survive. He also encounters a Russian nemesis, Ivan Vanko (played by Mickey Rourke), with a similar suit but enhanced by electro-whips.

There are spies, baddies, double-crossing, a love interest (Gwyneth Paltrow is ill-served by the part; her character, Pepper Potts, was more entertaining in the first instalment) and textbook narcissism which leads to (or is the result of?) a strained father/son relationship. But really, it’s all about the toys – including a race car, car race at the Monaco Grand Prix.

Das Weisse Band – Eine Deutsche Kindergeschinchte (The White Ribbon)
dir. Michael Haneke

I’m not sure what possessed me to watch a black and white German film with subtitles on the plane, but I’m glad it did. This is gripping stuff – not exactly action-packed though – a drama of psychological suspense and supposedly innocent children. A small village has all the usual characters – the priest, baron, schoolteacher, doctor, farmers, midwife and respective partners and children.

The villagers’ lives revolve uneventfully around the seasons – planting; harvest; winter – feasting and dancing, and could be a farmyard idyll with rustic scenes of pitchforks and scythes, haymaking and the village pump. There are no tricky camera angles – everything is straightforward – and no music; just the sound of the birds in the trees and the chickens in the yard; there are long silences and pauses with the sound of heavy footfalls and rustling skirts. It’s like a painting (in one funeral scene no one moves or speaks for about a minute and the focus doesn’t change) – but one where the perspective is skewed.

When there are mysterious deaths, accidents, tortures and disappearances, someone in the village has to be responsible. It soon becomes apparent that the village is intensely claustrophobic harbouring secrets, affairs, abuse and violence. Farmers mistrust each other, there are mutual suspicions and denunciation, dislike, jealousy, and revenge for perceived wrongdoings and injustices. The stilted family relations have no warmth in their interactions and the surroundings are ‘dominated by malice, envy, apathy and brutality.’ When a farmer hangs himself no one says a word.

The environment and the group of impressionable and malicious children (‘He’s at a difficult age’; ‘They’re always at a difficult age’) are reminiscent of The Crucible. The black and white filming works excellently as it should be clear-cut but there are shades of grey, and the story (narrated in a voice-over flashback from the teacher, Christian Friedel) is oblique and uncertain and curiously, interestingly, unfinished.

This is the last year of peace and, after the Archduke of Sarajevo is assassinated, the teacher is drafted and never returns to the village. Although he has his suspicions about the perpetrators of the pernicious crimes, they are never definitely proven. Whereas the village gossips discuss local rumours and small-town politics, the war makes the details irrelevant.

The children have been punished for the sins of the parents down to the third and fourth generations – the length of time since the First World War. Is the director (Michael Haneke) suggesting that global politics mean we should all move on and stop trying to apportion blame for past wrongs? It’s deep and it’s fascinating – the powerful mix of religious piety and terrifying evil may not be thrilling but it’s certainly chilling.

Shrek Forever After
dir. Mike Mitchell

Bored with monotonous domesticity, Shrek just wants to be an ogre again. He makes a deal with the malicious and maniacal Rumplestiltskin (voiced by Walt Dohrn) to have a day as a scary character of old rather than the ‘jolly green joke’ he has become. He claims he just wants things back the way they were, when he could do whatever he wanted, although as Princess Fiona admonishes, ‘You have three beautiful children and a wife who loves you. You have everything; how come the only person who can’t see that is you?’

The snag is that he trades a day of his life for the privilege of ogreness and Rumplestiltskin takes the day he was born, so he never existed and finds himself in an alternative reality where Princess Fiona rescued herself, Shrek has never met Donkey (although Donkey is shocked that Shrek knows his name), and Puss in Boots is now a Fat Cat.

Of course, it all works out as you would expect, with a fine blend of myth, nursery rhyme, fairytale and popular film culture played out against an eclectic soundtrack. The moral of the story appears to be that true love lasts beyond the initial flush of romance, but we are warned, ‘It’s all just a big fairytale.’

My Newest Favourite Thing: Pub Quizzes

For the last six weeks we have been going to the pub religiously (a curious adverb, but I'll leave that for another time) every Tuesday eveneing. There is nothing unusual in that of course - I enjoy a good pint of bitter or glass of chardonnay as much as the next lush - but we have been doing more than just imbibing; we have been pub-quizzing.

The dynamic of a pub quiz is fascinating; all the personalities come out to play. We run the gamut of stereotypes: competitive; timid; bullying; loud; hesitant; passive aggressive; anal (I confess that last one is me but then you knew that, didn't you?). And there is always the person who, when the answers are read out, says, "I was going to say that", to which I always think, "So, why didn't you?"

I like the quizzes that have rounds in different categories as everyone has a chance to shine in their specialist subject. We have an eclectic group who cover history, sport, science, literature, art, music, geaography and gardening. We struggle a little with 'popular ' culture if it's based on reality TV as all of us are over 35 and no longer in the demographic that enjoys watching anorexic teenagers be mean to each other while wrestling with the profundities of life such as how to boil an egg or share the hairdryer.

There's a certain amount of snobbery involved in these quizzes. The team that routinely wins is terrible at sport and proud of it, boasting of how little they know about it. This seems incredible to me. My father used to get incensed by people who jokingly dismissed their mathematical ignorance as though the arts were somehow more important (he probably still does, but I haven't lived with him for over 20 years, so don't hear about it as often). You know the type: "Oh, I was woeful at maths at school. It's so boring; I leave it to my accountant. Haw, haw!"

Sport-phobes are as bad. I enjoy watching football (as I may have mentioned), cricket, tennis, athletics, rowing, cycling, triathlon, skiing, and most sports that England play, among other activities. I don't particularly enjoy motor-racing, show-jumping or snooker, but I know a bit about them just from listening to the news and not being blinkered. A complete lack of interst in all sport is surely wilfull ignorance, just as it would be for someone to claim they hate all books or all films.

Besides, how do you know you don't like it unless you've tried it? If I've forced myself to read a Stieg Larsson novel, you can watch a football match - the latter takes a fraction of the time and is infinitely more exciting and less predictable. As Sir Thomas Beecham said, "Try everything once except folk dancing and incest." I think he was a little harsh on the folk dancing but otherwise his sentiments are admirable.

Anyway, these quizzes are usually for a good cause, whether it be the volunteer fire brigade, the local primary school or research into childhood leukemia. There are often raffles at which you can buy tickets for things you don't want, or auctions at which you can bid for things you don't need (Him Outdoors bid for a poker set and we've got a gas fire) just because it's for charity.

And, of course, you learn stuff. True, it may be largely irrelevant, but I am now cognisant of many facts:

• Pibroch is a type of music usually performed on the bagpipes
• Kinkalow and Lambkin Dwarves are cats
• Thanatology is the study of death
• Waitangi is the principal settlement on the Chatham Islands
• Members of the Queen's Council 'take silk'
• Richard Nixon made the first phone call to the moon
• The collective name for finches is a charm

Who knows when or if I will need this information again, but if I am ever called upon to climb the Auckland Sky Tower, I will know that there are 51 flights of steps to negotiate.

Let them eat cake!

The latest ridiculousness to be filed in the customer-is-always-righteous file is the recent issue of 'cakeage'. Thankfully, it is not quite a scandal or we would be hearing predictable stories of cake-gate.
 
Apparently a group of folk went to a restaurant in Richmond to celebrate a 70th birthday and were charged $12 to eat a cake they had baked themselves and brought along. They were 'disgusted' (I can but imagine their spurius indignation) and contacted their local paper to complain; note, incidentally, that they didn't discuss this with the restaurnt owner at the time. He later expressed himself to be 'shocked' by the response - you can't beat a dash of hyperbole in the kitchen.
 
I wonder what makes people think they can take their own food into a restaurant. Would these people go to a pub and crack out their own home-brew? Are these the people who go to the theatre to watch a performance and conduct their own conversation? Probably.
 
It is not the same as the service charge applied on public holidays, which is simply ludicrous. Some 'hospitality' outlets insist it costs more to open on these days; to pay staff an extra percentage on their meagre wages to compensate for them missing out on time with their loved ones or leisure activities; a cost which, apparently, is not recovered by the increased custom. In that case, this cost should be factored into the prices for the rest of the year. It's not as though Christmas is a surprise to anyone; even Easter may be a moveable feast, but you know it happens every year. That way the cost is spread through to everyone and is negligible.

But why should others shoulder the financial burden because you want to have your cake and eat it (in public) too? Why don't you just have it at home? This is similar to parents who bring their own food to cafés to feed their chidren. Their argument is that the café is making money from the mothers who buy a coffee. I've seen these meetings. Children throw food, drink and various bodily excretions around the place. They run, wriggle, fidget and scream.

All normal people are driven away or take one look at the bedlam and decide to eat elsewhere. After the mothers' mayhem has gone, the café is left to clean up and replace the tables and chairs to their original position, plus dispose of semi-masticated food that they haven't even provided. Some cafés are happy to provide this service, and fair play to them. I avoid such places.

I prefer to go to a café where I can enjoy my coffee and conversation in peace. Coffee houses were originally established as places to discuss the events of the day and share ideas. One of the first, Café Procope (est. 1686), was a major meeting venue for the proponents of the French Enlightenment, such as Voltaire, Rosseau, Diderot et al. It is arguably the birthplace of the Encyclopedie - the first modern encylopaedia; try writing that while being deafened by a toddler's tantrum! Lloyds of London began life as a coffee house where politics and business were the topics on the menu (sport was reserved for the pub).

There used to be a wonderful place like this in Queenstown where folk met to pontificiate and enjoy their caffeinated pleasures. The place ground the beans on location and you could purchase them whole - they were in big sacks at the side of the shop. It was a tiny venue and not conducive to small children clogging up the place with cumbersome pushchairs, falling off the stools or plunging their grubby mitts into sackfuls of coffee. The owner banned children from the premises. One crusading mother took him to the Commission of Human Rights and her complaint was upheld. He has since moved on and there is now no refuge from screaming miniature hooligans in town.

Restaurants and cafés should have the right to charge what they choose to serve whom they want. They should print their charges and intentions clearly so there can be no confusion. And then everyone can make an educated decision about where they spend their time and money. If you don't like disruptive infants, child-free zones, or paying for 'cakeage', go somewhere else. There are plenty of choices, and so there should be. Vive la difference! (as they would have said at Le Café Procope).

Red card? My Arse!

We was robbed, and you know we were...

Still a strong performance and encouraging for our first game of the season. Even down to ten men, the Arse couldn't score against us and we had to do it for them.

Who needs to gamble when you can experience blind optimism and crushing disappointment just by supporting Liverpool?

Adventures with Thermal Girl

Last week a friend (let’s call her Thermal Girl) came to visit from England via Sydney, and we had five fantastic days of fun and catching up. We even did some tourist stuff. Here are the highlights:
 

Monday – At passport control Thermal Girl had filled in a form to say where she staying during her visit to New Zealand. She didn’t know our address but wrote down our email. The bloke interviewing her couldn’t read her handwriting so she spelt it out for him. ‘Oh, I know them!’ he said. She thought he was joking – as you would – until he gave his name and said for her to say hello to us from him. Welcome to New Zealand, where the cliché about two degrees of separation is actually true.

This was Thermal Girl’s first visit to our beautiful country. It was a fine day; she looked around at the blue sky, white mountains, and green rivers. ‘Wow’ she said. And then she said, ‘wow’ again. It’s always nice to be reminded of what a scenic location we inhabit, just to ward off complacency.

I took her back to our place and fed her wine and crackers. When Him Outdoors came home he made us chilli. She likes our house. She likes the fire most of all, and didn’t move from in front of it all night.

Tuesday – Thermal Girl has packed several layers of thermals. She put them all on for a trip to Queenstown where she went to visitor information places, booked skiing packages, and examined bus timetables.

We met for lunch at Pier 19 and lingered over coffees, switching tables to stay in the sunshine – I thought she was very brave to sit outside; those layers were clearly doing their job.


In the evening we took her to the local PTA Quiz at Fox’s Bar in Arrowtown. Our friend, Heart of the District, made up our foursome and we looked to him to answer any questions relating to rugby or Kiwi sport in general. At one point Thermal Girl asked, ‘Is this the sort of quiz where it’s frowned upon to look up the answers on your i-phone?’ Is there a sort of quiz where it isn’t?

We learned that Lake Baikal is the deepest freshwater lake in the world. Apparently it contains approximately 20% of all the liquid freshwater reserves on earth. A haboob is a sandstorm, P&O – as in cruises – stands for Peninsular and Oriental (not Pacific and Oriental), and in the expression mind your ‘p’s and ‘q’s; the letters stand for pints and quarts. Thermal Girl can’t say that she hasn’t received a dose of culture on her tour down under.

Wednesday – Today’s activity was skiing. A bus took Thermal Girl up the mountain where she sashayed down the slopes and re-fuelled with hot chocolates and toasted sandwiches. She says her eyesight isn’t that great and she struggles to tell the difference between the blue and the black runs – she finds out which is which when she is halfway down, which could be interesting!

She says it is all very efficient and she is very impressed with the lack of children on the slopes and the waiting time in queues. She does, however, wonder why the toilets are down a flight of stairs rather than all on the same level.

We called round to a friend’s place in the evening where we drank wine, talked nonsense and ate pizza. Thermal Girl wanted to know why Kiwi houses don’t have radiators – a good question and one I still can’t answer after living here for 14 years – and why they put bananas on pizzas. I can’t answer that one either.

Thursday – After another full day’s skiing, Thermal Girl came to my book club with me. She finds it curious that we don’t really talk about books, and certainly not the same one as each other. The eating and drinking met with her approval, however. She reviewed One Day by David Nicholls which sounds pretty good, although it is being made into a film ‘starring’ Anne Hathaway (because clearly there are no English actresses available), so that should ruin that, then.

Friday – We had a voucher for a trip to Milford Sound incorporating a nature trip on a boat, so we gave that to Thermal Girl. She said she wanted to do something touristy and sight-seeing-ish so we thought this would be appropriate. She agreed, particularly enjoying the views, the penguins and the dolphins, although she was less enamoured with Te Anau – ‘does anything actually ever happen there?’

On the return trip it was dark outside so the bus passengers were ‘treated’ to a couple of Kiwi classic films. She found Whale Rider ‘interesting in a naff sort of way’. It had subtitles for the hearing impaired and every now and then it would say ‘mystical music’ across the bottom of the screen. Thermal Girl said some of the ‘hideous wailing’ made her wish she were hearing impaired herself.

The World’s Fastest Indian met with a little more approval despite Anthony Hopkins having ‘an extremely odd accent’ – that’s Invercargill for you. She exited the bus before the final destination (I picked her up from Frankton Bus Station) so she missed the end of the film. When she mentioned this later in the pub, she was told succinctly, ‘he gets the record and then he dies.’ That’s also Invercargill for you.

In said pub Thermal Girl apologised profusely but she doesn’t really drink beer. It seems a shame when the Arrow Brewing Company makes such fine ales, but when she couldn’t finish her sauvignon blanc, there were no takers; in our entirely non-scientific experiment, people from Invercargill, Newcastle, Burnley and Essex prefer beer. We went next door to Mantra for a fine Indian meal – it’s just wonderful to have everything so handily placed to each other!

Saturday – Provisions was our first port of call for breakfast and coffee. I’m still not sure what is the best time to avoid the young family brigade; the ones who take over an entire room with their toys and papers – each parent and child monopolizing a different table while shouting to each other across the cafe. I really like the place, but would like it a lot more if it resembled a disorganised crèche a little less.

Thermal Girl had packed away most of her layers and we took her to Brennan for a final wine-tasting. She decided she liked the pinot grigio very much but couldn’t have too much as she was about to get on a plane. Tracey talked us through all the nuances and subtleties of the wine; its origin; flavours and history. She was knowledgeable, chatty and very friendly. We bought a 2008 Gewürztraminer and a 2007 Pinot Noir to take home and put in our riddling rack.

I think we packed in quite a lot to entertain our guest in the past five days and I was very sad to see her off at the airport, but I thoroughly enjoyed her visit and hope she did too.

National Poetry Day

Today is National Poetry Day so I thought I would share with you one of my lyrical creations from yester-year. One weekend as some friends and I were camping out at Bob's Cove we decided to entertain ourselves at dinner (hand-caught and barbecued fish) by inventing poems based around celebrities - yes kids; that's how we used to amuse ourselves before we all plugged in to i-phones!

I don't think I'm boasting when I say that my poem is the one that is still remembered by the group several years later. In fact, of everything I've ever written, this is the only thing that anyone ever quotes at me. I'm not sure what sticks most in the memory: the deceptively simple but subtly complex structure; the mesmerisingly eloquent rhythm or the deeply insightful persipience. I'll allow to you make up your own mind.

Russell Crowe

Russell Crowe

Wants to know

Where to go

In the snow.

Could you show

Russell Crowe

Where to go

In the snow?

No.

Books read in January 2010

Below are short reviews of the books that I read in January 2010. The numbers in the brackets are the marks I have given them out of five.

Sixty Lights – Gail Jones (4.1)
In 1860 Lucy Strange and her brother Thomas are orphaned and sent from Australia to live with an uncle in London. As she grows up she gets a job making photographic paper from albumen. The egg-whites are smelly, “but it had about it the pre-industrial gratification of completion, of an entire art of manufacture.” She leaves London for India, where she is meant to marry, but she has a liaison on the boat on the way over with a married man and she arrives pregnant. That description may sound perfunctory, but the style of this novel is far more important than the substance.

Lucy sees her life as a series of random reflections, like a selection of photos in an album, and she does in fact become a photographer. She feels overwhelmed by the responsibility of narration and the traditional novel is not a form that appeals to her because she cannot see the ‘story’ of her life. This is often a complaint of debut novelists who have the characters, descriptions and incidents, but can’t find a flowing form. Instead, she abandons the structures of storytelling simply presenting images, and Lucy records events as Special Things Seen.

Gail Jones’ method seems a little contrived, like a creative writing class exercise. Some of the vignettes are completely irrelevant, although the poeticism makes them almost forgivable. Presenting memories as images also allows Jones to telescope time and highlight certain episodes above each other.

Their uncle reads Great Expectations to Lucy and Thomas – this seems to be the standard text to read to colonials (Sixty Lights was written two years before Lloyd Jones’ Mr Pip). The children are seduced by its suggestions of escape and improvement, and these themes run throughout the book. Lucy is a medium; a device to capture meaning, like the camera which distils an image, living her life like a negative – the space around her holds more significance than she can herself.

Disgrace – J.M. Coetzee (4.5)
The novel that won the 1999 Booker Prize 1999 is a slim volume with a bleak outlook. Life in South Africa has a constant undercurrent of casual violence and a complete lack of easy answers. David Lurie is dismissed from his position at a university in Cape Town due to an affair with a student for which he refuses to apologise. He takes refuge with his daughter Lucy on her farm, hoping to benefit from the natural rural rhythms, but he is forced to question his assumptions after a brutal attack on the farm by three black men leaves him assaulted and Lucy raped.

The story itself is easy to follow, although there are many depths and questions raised. The old guard is deposed, the new wave instated, and there must be sacrifices. The old generation is replaced by the new and there follows the ritual slaying of the old king. David, as a teacher of romantic literature, is more than aware of the mythical elements.

This introduces the premise of survival of the fittest as science takes its place alongside literature. Lucy is a kennel-keeper for dogs and David comes to care for them, even as he helps a neighbour euthanize the ones that cannot be saved. He sees this as a mercy killing – the only thing left that can be done for them – but who makes these rules?

The fact that David is her father brings an added dimension to his horror of Lucy’s rape – he could do nothing to stop the attack and can now do nothing to affect the outcome. When he was accused of abuse and harassment, it was handled very differently in an academic urban setting to how it is in the country. Coetzee breaks the man down until he is stripped of all his illusions. He is even challenged over what it means to be a father as Lucy admonishes him for thinking of her only as a minor character in his life. “I am not minor. I have a life of my own, just as important to me as yours is to you, and in my life I am the one who makes the decisions.”

He can’t even take refuge in language as he discovers it is insufficient to cover the scope of this particular narrative. “More and more he is convinced that English is an unfit medium for the truth of South Africa. Like a dinosaur expiring and settling in the mud, the language has stiffened.”

The novel may be slight but its content is weighty. This is a powerful and deserving award-winner that demands to be read.

Killing My Own Snakes – Anne Leslie (4.2) Subtitled, ‘The extraordinary life of a Daily Mail and Fleet Street legend’ this memoir records the struggles Ann Leslie faced as a female journalist and foreign correspondent. From a fairly sheltered existence she was sent to cover stories of war, poverty and unspeakable cruelty, but was also able to be present at some of the greatest moments in twentieth century history, such as the fall of the Berlin Wall and the release of Nelson Mandela.

Leslie describes the state of journalism when she began writing in the Fifties for the Express – dominated by machismo and alcohol. She negates the idea of the Swinging Sixties as a media construct coined with hindsight. She claims, “Of course, the Sixties didn’t swing in Hull or Gravesend. In reality, outside a small geographical section of London, Britain as a whole remained as purse-mouthed, frugal and dyed-in-the-wool conservative as ever.”

Through her years in journalism Leslie saw changes in gender politics but also in class obsession, when regional accents, rather than Received Pronunciation, became de rigueur. Don’t imagine however, that Leslie feels protective towards the sisterhood. She shows a lack of support for other women: she not only wants to be one of the lads, but the only woman in a masculine environs. She refers to women as “frizzy-haired” and picks on their appearance when it has no relevance, taking sideswipes at Guardian readers and other females. Her attitude towards sexual abuse is outmoded and shocking in its lack of compassion. She can be sympathetic to women as long as they are not Western or possible competitors, demonstrating an interest in the rates of literacy among Arab women, but only inasmuch as it effects the economy.

Of course, she has strong opinions, many of which I don’t agree with, and she records some of her writings simply because she is proud of the rhetoric. They sound alarmingly like screaming Daily Mail oratory. Her piece on the release of Mandela tells us more about her than him, and she has a sneering way of writing about people of whom she doesn’t approve. When confronted with something she doesn’t understand, she turns to typical right-wing hard-line criticism and disparagement.

She can be cringe-worthily cocksure, and her attitude on war is fairly simplistic with clear-cut terms of right and wrong (left). I may not agree with her political leanings, and some of her caustic comments display an unpleasant bitterness, but there are some mitigating sections of great descriptive writing. This is generally an interesting examination of journalism through the past few decades, with particular interest in her early years of sexual and class oppression; perhaps as a lighter counterpoint to Kate Adie’s The Kindness of Strangers.