Halle's hot and Dahl's hut

So Halle Berry’s been in Glasgow over the weekend filming her latest flick. I was reading yesterday that there is someone employed on set, standing, waiting patiently behind camera who runs out as soon as the director shouts cut and rubs Halle’s hands. Her poor, wee cold hands. This same person also provides Halle with a nice hot water bottle at each scene’s break, helping her brave the freezing cold Scottish air.
It’s not even cold yet?!
Berry’s filming an adaptation of David Mitchell’s ‘Cloud Atlas’. And no, the author is not the same David Mitchell as the smarmy one with the hook nose and bulbous eyes with a penchant for making snippy comments whom I reckoned it was when I originally seen ‘Cloud Atlas’ in the book charts. This David Mitchell has been shortlisted for the booker prize and is now getting his books made into films starring big Hollywood names. The git.
I get very jealous of writers. People writing stories and getting paid for it. Especillay once they start getting made into big Hollywood movies. David Mitchell will be loaded now. Mega bucks for spending your days, sitting at home, writing, or in Edinburgh coffee shops if your J. K. ‘I was a poor, lonely, single Mum’, Rowling.
Can you sense the jealousy? (Not of being a single Mum...)
Every time I’ve tried to settle down in a coffee shop to write a book I’ve always been chucked out an hour or so after my first tea (I don’t drink coffee) or at the very least received growls from the folks behind the counter or had a wet mop flung over my shoes as a subtle hint.
How did J.K. ‘my ideas are all completely original’, Rowling get away with it? She must have spent a hell of a lot of her single parent benefits on posh coffee.
Or maybe it was a tea drinker vendetta. It was simply because she was a slurper of the coffee bean. Like I said, I’ve never drank coffee. Perhaps the coffee shops I was perched in were discriminating against me because I was a tea drinker. That would explain why tea is always p**s poor in those ridiculously overpriced coffee shops, because they simply do not cater for, and have no intention of catering for, tea drinkers. Especially ones that are trying to come up with the next multi million pound making fantasy series to envelop the whole childrens’ fiction reading market.
Roald Dahl, the genius and a favourite author of mine since I was a kid, who would have been 95 last week, made the headlines a few days ago, not only because of his birthday (even though it’s not really his birthday because he’s dead) but because his poor little garden hut is falling apart.
Yes, Dahl’s dilapidated, old hut at the bottom of his garden is apparently in imminent danger of falling apart and Dahl’s family have started a campaign to save, and move, his hut to the Roald Dahl museum in Buckinghamshire.
That’s a nice thought. Treasuring and perhaps partly restoring, what was the birthplace of so many classic and wonderful stories.
At least it was a nice thought until the family insisted they wanted half a million quid for their trouble.
Half a million quid? To save a garden hut?
Are the Dahl offspring having a laugh?
My Dad’s got two garden huts in his garden but I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t need half a million quid to give them a bit of a refurbishment, even if it did mean sticking them on the back of a lorry to shift them to a different location. He could probably even install a wee swimming pool in each of them and it wouldn’t cost him half a million quid. Perhaps a mini bar and an HD TV too?
And another thing, why the hell can’t the Dahl offspring pay for the refurbishment and transportation of their famous author patriarch’s garden hut themselves? Surely they can afford it with the royalties they’re earning off the back of his hut originated creative genius?
That Sophie Dahl could cut back on the old chocolate cake and put a few quid in the bank for a start, not to mention, lose a couple of pounds. Talk about the everlasting gobstopper…
It was a simple garden hut made out of brick and polystyrene with a mouldy old chair, a rotten old sleeping bag and a crumbling old suitcase inside. Dahl must have been freezing in the winter months. I bet he could have done with one of Halle Berry’s hot water bottles in those days.
How much would that hut cost to ship? I reckon that Dahl lot have been selling on ebay. One of these sellers that inflates their price by grossly overestimating the old postage and packaging.
‘Yes, this item is well worth a look at. This item has been previously used, and probably abused. A great little garden retreat. Brilliant for hiding yourself away in to get away from the wife or the grandweans that are screaming for chocolate. A little worn on the inside, and out. Brick crumbling. Polystyrene mouldy. Plenty of bugs and parasites. Perhaps the occasional fox.
Worth around £5. Postage? Half a million quid’.
Sophie Dahl described it as a place of ‘palpable magic and limitless imagination’.
After her grandfather’s lifetime of fantastic writings and creative genius I’m sure her bank account could be described as something similar.