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.

Shadow Laureate

SONG IN SPACE
When man first flew beyond the sky
He looked back into the world's blue eye.
Man said: What makes your eye so blue?
Earth said: The tears in the ocean do.
Why are the seas so full of tears?
Because I've wept so many thousand years.
Why do you weep as you dance through space?
Because I am the mother of the human race.


Adrian Mitchell
24.10.32 - 20.12.08

Mind bloggling

It is always surprising to read messages from folk that say they enjoy reading your blog or in my case, diary, or even, to give it it's official, perhaps slightly ostentatious title, 'journal'. This is my 100th post and I never once thought I would get this far. The whole experience of writing life's thoughts, happenings, meetings and conversations has actually turned out to be more fun than I thought, even though I'm certainly not documenting anything particularly spectacular. Then again, that depends how you define 'spectacular' I suppose... Everyone's ideas of 'spectacular' are very different. The fact I've kept this up is spectacular in itself perhaps. Looking back, I reckon it was hitting the grand old age of thirty that did it. On the event of the birthday I think I panicked as I could not remember where the last thirty years had gone and what the hell I had done with them. There was school, school, uni then work. But what happened inbetween, and during, come to mention it? Where does it all go? Where did it all whizz off to? They say life is fleeting but this is ridiculous. In the beginning I reckon this was all an effort to try and document something... anything?! Together with the odd rant, review and other extraneous thoughts thrown in for good measure, of course, I discovered what this blogging thing is all about.
When I first activated my own website (www.reidnet.org.uk) I had the intention of using it as an online portfolio, which I still use it for, but also as a place for family folk and mates to hang out. I engineered a messageboard for it, with much difficulty at the time, which only a few folk ended up using, usually arguing. This made it considerably pointless. That's where I went wrong. It was not a messageboard I wanted but a proper writing blog. A much better, easier way of saying something online. Okay, Bebo, Myspace and all these other online communities are great at that but more often than not you get a whole bunch of emails from complete weirdos, who you don't know from adam, asking you to be their friends. People sitting at home, on their computers, jumping with glee when they hit the fifty friend mark (or whatever friend amount would make you jump with glee). I'm not particularly interested in what celebrity I may or may not look like, adopting a computer generated duck or what kind of alcoholic drink I would be. Well, okay, the alcoholic drink I'm curious about, but usually I'm quite happy to just sit and type. This blog has been great in talking to folk on other blogs, some on other countries, reading other peoples' writing, getting inspiration, ideas, motivation and generally gaining a better way of exploring the web. In short, I'm having fun writing on this journal, whether people read it or not.