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.

Black for good

Ka is soaked. Ka, along with a bunch of friends and acquaintances, have been standing in Hampden all evening, listening to, watching, and no doubt screaming passionately, at Take That who have arrived in Glasgow today, tonight being the first of three live shows they are putting on for all the Scottish fans. It’s now a sisterly tradition for Ka and Angela to go to Hampden to see “their boys” every time the Manchester group venture this far up the country. Being Ka and Angela they are not just simply going to a gig though. No. When Ka and Angela go to a gig together, they’ve got to do it with some style. So following the buying of concert tickets Angela hires a chauffeur limo to take them all to Hampden along with a few bottles of champagne and no doubt a couple of bags of nibbles for good luck. They’ll be lucky if the limo doesn’t get mobbed by confused Take That fans, believing their stretched car to be full of Manchester pop stars.
Apparently the weather has not been kind tonight and even after the delights of a few bottles of champagne, Ka moaned over the phone with the need for a cup of tea.
Ka never drinks tea? I’m the tea drinker of the house, or the Tea Jennie, as my Aunt Mina used to call me. Ka’s a coffee girl and very rarely accepts an offer of the golden Char. If, on the odd occasion, she ever does drink tea, there has to be a bar of Dairy Milk involved. She’s black coffee, all the way, without fail. I’m the opposite and never drink coffee. Though I have been tempted recently.
A few weeks back we splashed out and, with the help of some near out of date Currys vouchers we’d received at our Wedding from Colin and Jillian, bought ourselves a Tassimo machine.
It’s all very impressive. Sitting there in the kitchen, it’s sleak, polished black form standing tall at one side of the kitchen intimidating the white plastic kettle on the other side of the room. The kettle with it’s slightly stained exterior, cowers on the other side of the kitchen, it’s one sole switch wearing away with age and it’s one light no competition against the flashing greens and reds which flicker on and off with the production of the near instantaneous coffees. The tea pot stands by the kettle, like a trusted friend also aging and in need of replacement, standing firm like a stubborn General, refusing to retire or retreat.
The Tassimo produces some great smells too but, so far, even the aroma from the small pots placed inside the machine which churn out the perfect cups of coffee have not been enough to sway me to the dark side yet. However, it is surprisingly flexible for a coffee machine. It produces Hot Chocolates too. Lattes, Mochas, Espressos, Creamy Tiramisu delights and, wait for it, tea! Yes, instead of having to put a teabag in a mug or teapot, go to the efforts of swirling it about and adding milk and any of the other ritualistic rigmaroles you go through in order to make your own cup of Rosy Lee all you have to do is simply insert a Twinings Tea disc of English Breakfast, Green Tea, Earl Grey or, my favourite, Darjeeling, and it does it all for you.
Well, when I say it does it all for you, you still have to change the T disc to the Milk variety in order to get your dairy hit, which means more fiddling with the machine cap, more pressing of buttons and waiting on more lights changing colour.
In fact, it’s all way too much hassle for me. Even after I bought a pack of Darjeeling discs, in order to get some use out of the the Tassimo for myself, I’ve yet to use it.
I’ll stick with the General and the kettle, which I’ll just go and put on for Ka coming in.