Wherever I lay my hat…

A few weeks ago, I was at an event on affordable warmth. During the coffee break, I was chatting to a senior colleague about how we could encourage tenants and landlords in the private rented sector to install energy efficiency measures (cavity wall insulation, etc.) and I started to talk about my experience as a tenant.

“Oh. You still rent?” She seemed genuinely surprised. “Why haven’t you bought a house yet?”

I can’t remember the reason I gave at the time but I get asked that question a lot and I usually say one of the following:

• We’ve just not got round to it
• We like the flexibility of being able to move at the drop of a hat
• We can’t really afford the deposit
• We can’t afford the kind of house we’d really like to live in and aren’t willing to compromise.

All of those things are true but, this week, it occurred to me that there’s another reason.  I have lived in rented properties for the vast majority of my life and I’m just used to it.

I was six when my parents separated and my mum and I moved in to rented accommodation. We lived in four different rented properties until I was 13 and she and my step-dad bought the house that’s still in my phonebook as ‘Home’. (I often accidentally phone it when I’m trying to get hold of my husband.) Then I left home for university at 18 and, since then, I’ve rented six different flats and houses.

That’s twelve addresses, plus the houses my dad lived in, which I visited at weekends. I’ve lived in every kind of property you can think of.

Despite the surprise of my colleague and others, my husband and I feel under no pressure to buy a house. We’ll do it at some point but for now, we live in a fantastic house, in a desirable area, with a good landlord and letting agent who do what they need to do but are otherwise pretty hands-off and don’t charge a fortune.

Sure, we’ve experienced some of the drawbacks to renting. There are little things that you’d change if it was worth the investment; the visits from bailiffs and police officers looking for previous tenants; the extortionate letting agent fees for renewing six monthly contracts; the house inspections; the visit from your landlord to give you your notice because he needs to sell the house. A particular low point in my life as a tenant was the day a previous landlord took DIY matters in to his own hands in order to save money and our dining room was filled with raw sewage. I can still remember that smell.

But I could live with all that if it wasn’t for an attitude that is summed up every weekday morning on BBC1, when the presenters of Homes Under The Hammer suggest that significantly less effort and money should be put into a property because it is “just a rental”. Now, I’m not naïve enough to think that there aren’t tenants who trash properties and that landlords are going to ensure the finest and most expensive fixtures and fittings for a property that is not their own home. But, when they do a shoddy job because they don’t think tenants deserve better, they are missing two important points: firstly, that without good tenants, their buy-to-let investment is worth a lot less and, secondly, that when you put shit in, you get shit out.

When it comes down to it, the house I rent is my home. I don’t own the bricks and mortar (let’s face it, the landlord probably doesn’t either) but I live out my life in it every single day and so I care for it as though it is my own. We’ll make the leap at some point but, in the meantime, we’re just not that hung up on ownership and that suits me.

14 days, 14 films

Two weeks ago, I wrote about Film Fortnight, an arguably pointless but extreme exercise in getting the most out of a marketing campaign.

Well, two weeks have now passed, the ironing pile has grown tall, the kitchen cupboards have grown bare and fourteen films have, quite frankly, blurred in to one another. But we made it to the very bitter end. I’m not saying this is the proudest moment of my life, but it is quite an achievement, I think you’ll agree. Sure, there were ups and there were downs and we were late to dinner with @omrrc and @dozylilsis on one occasion because we had to squeeze in a film beforehand (sorry). But we had a goal and we achieved it.

So, what have I learnt from this experience? I’ve learnt that there is direct correlation between the amount of time I spend watching films and the quality of food I eat. I’ve learnt that I find it difficult to look a person in the eye when I rent films from them over fourteen consecutive days. I’ve learnt that Hollywood was right all along and Ryan Gosling really is a star. I’ve learnt the most efficient way of getting in and out of the tricky Blockbuster car park at peak time. I’ve learnt that – Eddie Murphy and Jason Statham vehicles aside – I do love film.

Here’s a quick rundown of our fortnight:

1. Senna – wonderful, excellently well-made documentary. Moving and exciting. 
2. Tyrannosaur – bleak and beautiful. Olivia Coleman’s performance is incredible.
3. Crazy Stupid Love – a quirky, enjoyable romantic comedy, slightly baggy in the middle but Ryan Gosling is ridiculously charming and Emma Stone reinforces her position as my favourite girl in Hollywood. Didn’t see the twist coming.
4. Tower Heist – not very good at all but Casey Affleck just about kept me watching.
5. Contagion – awful. Jude Law plays an irritating blogger, whilst Matt Damon loses his wife and step-son to a killer virus and just about manages to looks a bit miffed about it. Not to mention the repeated shots of people touching their faces and door handles and sandwiches and toilet seats and lift buttons and bannisters and YES YES WE GET THE POINT.
6. The Guard – I don’t really remember what I thought of this. Sorry.
7. Super 8 – what it lacks in any kind of story, it makes up for in fun, nostalgia and explosions.
8. Bridemaids – not as funny as you all made out. Chris O’Dowd should be in more films though.
9. Beginners – ever so slightly too hipster but Christopher Plummer is just wonderful and his character’s story is joyful and inspiring and sad all at once. I loved it.
10. The Adjustment Bureau – not the worst film I saw. An interesting idea and Matt Damon and Emily Blunt are extremely watchable but it isn’t as clever as it would like to be.
11. Killer Elite – Chris’s choice. I didn’t watch this, I phoned my mum instead. Unfortunately, this was the only time any of the Blockbuster staff initiated a conversation about the film I’d rented.
12. The Ides of March – slick, smart political thriller, in which Ryan Gosling is once again brilliant (I know, I’m sold). Slightly abrupt ending. Was extremely disappointed when I realised during the end credits that I’d rented the film on 14th March. Dreadful planning.
13. Win Win – charming and funny film, with a fantastic performance by Alex Shaffer in his debut and the always-good Paul Giamatti. 
14. Inglourious Basterds – a second viewing of a film I really enjoyed. Still good and, interestingly, the second Melanie Laurent film of the fortnight.

I might even go back and pay to rent some more films… 

Introducing… Film Fortnight!

Yesterday, I was forced to visit a well-known high street DVD rental store. It’s been a long time since I’ve been inside said store but LoveFilm’s ongoing beef with Universal means that there was really no other (legal) way of watching Senna (other than buying it, which I’m not bothered enough to do, or borrowing it – thanks Rob!).

It turns out I’m not actually a member so I signed up for new membership. Seriously, guys… A *paper* form?! *Requiring* a landline number?!

We’ll forgive them that though, because then they gave me 14 free rentals: one a day for two weeks. Now, I realise that they do this because most people won’t go in every single day for a fortnight to rent a film and fair play to them. Times are tough in the rental market and I’ve now been in the store two days in a row so something has worked. Eventually, I might even buy a bag of Butterkist while I’m in there.

Now, I like nothing more than a challenge (see also: Bus Challenge, Nail Challenge, etc.) and I am absolutely determined to rent and watch a film every day for fourteen days. Chris is on board, we have a list of more than fourteen films that we’d like to watch and we’ve got pretty quick meals planned for weeknights so it’s totally doable.

We’re two days in now and so far we’ve seen Senna and Tyrannosaur (or at least, I’ve seen Tyrannosaur and Chris went to the climbing wall instead). Both are excellent films. Senna is a wonderful piece of documentary making with a gripping story, an incredible feat considering it is made entirely of archive footage. It portrays the same, intriguing will to race as TT3D did (although it does it much, much better) and the inevitable conclusion to the film is genuinely emotional.

Tyrannosaur is a draining experience: bleak and dark and harrowing. But the performances are incredible and there is a wonderful tenderness between the two protagonists between bouts of extreme violence. I haven’t seen The Iron Lady, but I’d bet any amount of money Meryl Streep’s performance in that isn’t as good as Olivia Coleman’s in Tyrannosaur, even if the Best Actress awards suggest otherwise.

Tomorrow, we’re watching something that won’t make me cry…

What I’ve learnt about internet dating and how I’d do it differently

I’ve recently had reason to spend a bit of time on internet dating site, www.mysinglefriend.com, and it has been rather enlightening. (Fear ye not, all is well in the Taylor marriage. I’ve just been looking at and recommending girls for a friend. No, really.)

I’m not what you’d call an expert on dating. I’ve been with my husband for nearly ten years, having been friends beforehand, and was in an 18 month relationship immediately (ahem) before that. I’ve only been asked on one date (during sixth form) and I stood him up because my friend Gem phoned whilst I was on the bus to Southampton to meet my date and invited me to join her at Jumpin’ Jaks which, in my book back then, inexplicably and rather embarrassingly took precedence. All of this may explain why nobody else has ever asked me on a date.

Not being an expect, I’ve learnt rather a lot. Ladies, take note… (I should clarify that I’m not picking on girls. I just haven’t looked at any male profiles – again, no, really – so can’t comment on them.)

1. Internet dating is quite stressful and also a little bit soul destroying. There are a lot of girls out there. Some might be awesome. Some might not be awesome. All I know – and this may be difficult for some male readers to believe – is that I have a threshold when it comes to looking a photos of girls and this week, I’ve gone well beyond that threshold. On a more serious note, this has put a new perspective on my friend’s relationship with internet dating. I know he’s found it tough at times, that it’s difficult to see the wood for the trees and that there’s an unwritten etiquette that can result in all kinds of anxieties. I also know that his current open-minded attitude towards it – to take a chance and see how it goes – is the best approach and that, to be honest, more of the girls on MSF could take a leaf out of his book.
2. It’s really, really hard to get the photo right. I can relate to this one. What single photo makes you look: a) hot, b) the kind of girl a guy would take home to his mum, c) serious/intelligent,  d) fun/spontaneous, e) etc. on the internet? What I’ve learnt from MSF is that most girls go for a), with a few opting for d). I can’t blame them for that but my feedback would be that – without exception – I have found the nicest, most appealing photos of girls in their secondary gallery. These are usually photos of the girl taken during the daytime, wearing a little makeup and ALWAYS smiling. Not pouting, MySpace style. Or doing a wacky face. Smiling. There are plenty of very, very pretty ladies on MSF but you could be easily led to think there aren’t.
3. Against Her Better Judgement makes this point far more succinctly than I, but some users and/or their friends appear to put very little effort in to their profiles and you kind of wonder whether they really want to stand out from the crowd. I came across very few profiles that don’t describe the lady in question as loyal, generous, gorgeous, funny, intelligent, etc. and little else. These are all lovely qualities that I guess you’d hope to find in a girlfriend but they’re so overused, they tell you very little about what makes a person tick. The interesting profiles are those that are creative (although not with the truth, obviously).
4. The vast majority of girls appear to be teachers, doctors or solicitors who have just got back from Cambodia. I have no idea what the significance of this is but it’s a strange thing.

Ledbury Poetry Festival, 9 July 2011

Leigh and I spent a showery Saturday at the Ledbury Poetry Festival; it was both my first time in Ledbury and my first time to the festival. I loved both. The town itself is a fantastic mix of 17^th century buildings, cobbled streets and alleyways and hidden modern gems.

Such as Scandinavian interior design store, Hus & Hem, which is bright, clean and everything Ikea wishes it could be. And it sells these, very cool trophy deer heads:

Further down a cobbled alley, we stumbled across the wholly-unexpected Tinsmiths building (which Jonathan Glancey talks about here):

(Image from: http://davidnice.blogspot.com/2008_08_01_archive.html)

However, what Ledbury lacks is a selection of restaurants willing to serve customers between 5pm and 6pm. Just when Leigh and I needed to eat. Cue a dash to visit Leigh’s partner’s mum, who knocked together a delicious home-cooked meal in her beautiful kitchen, overlooking the Herefordshire countryside. Wonderful.

Fed and watered, we ventured back to the town centre and to the Burgage Hall for our first event: Stuart Maconie’s Poetry Playlist. A Desert Island Discs affair, Maconie talked about his love of poetry and picked ten of his favourite poems, reading them from his iPad (or, where technology let him down, a fail-safe piece of paper). His choices ranged from familiar classics – such as Keats’s ‘An Ode to Autumn’ (which I had to recite at school, I can still do so) – to poems I’ve never heard of but thoroughly enjoyed. I am very pleased to have discovered Billy Collins’s ‘Man In Space’ – the best poem about feminism I ever heard (and by a man!). Maconie was witty and engaging; his description of Philip Larkin as poetry’s Morrissey was absolutely spot on and his unashamed love of poetry was evident.

After a quick half of Wye Valley Brewery’s HPA in the Prince of Wales (hurrah!), we were joined by Hilary for readings by Ann Caldwell and Costa winner Jo Shapcott. Caldwell’s sequence of eight poems – The Underwater House – reminded me of Ali Shaw’s strange fairy tale, ‘The Girl With The Glass Feet’, and of the maritime storytelling of Jeanette Winterson’s ‘Lighthousekeeping’. Both particular favourites of mine.

Our last event was the Jamaican dub poet, Jean ‘Binta’ Breeze, who we’d spotted earlier whiling away the July afternoon on a shabby sofa outside the Prince of Wales, cigarette and wine in hand. Breeze was an absolute blast. She read and sang her poems of history and heritage and lust and loss and the audience lapped it up. Her poem ‘The Flag’ moved me to tears and she had me singing along by the end.

All in all, a lovely day. Here’s Simon Armitage reading ‘The Christening’ (from 2:29) – one of Maconie’s Top Ten – to make you smile and also frown a little bit in confusion.

“Stuff comes blurting out.”

Priscilla, Queen of Cardiff

I’ll be honest, I’m all test-driven out. I am all finance planned out. I am all spec’d out. But I’ve put down a deposit and sometime soon I will be the proud owner of a lovely new car that meets my primary requirement of Being Man Enough To Get Up Birdlip Hill Every Day. She’s great, I’ve already named her – Sophia 2.0, after her predecessor and her engine size, obviously (let it go – I’m quite proud of the name) – and I’m pretty much counting down the days until I can collect her.

In the meantime, it got me thinking about my first car.

Meet Priscilla, Queen of Cardiff…

Priscilla was an F-reg (that’s 1988 if you were wondering) white Ford Escort, an unexpected gift from my sister, her husband and my brother in 2001. She got me from my home in Southampton to my student house in Cardiff and to my then-boyfriend’s house in Pembrokeshire and I loved her because she was my first car.

Sure, she was a little rough around the edges and changing gear was a bit like stirring cake mixture in a pudding bowl but the freedom…! Ah, no more 7 hour National Express journeys (SEVEN HOURS). I could smoke in the car without my parents knowing (I’m pretty sure they knew), I could listen to my tapes loudly and shamelessly sing along… For the few months that she was mine, I loved her unconditionally.

 

(Alas, The Good Queen Priscilla is now in the great scrapyard in the sky.)

Another year, another festival

It hardly seems a year since I last wrote about the Cheltenham Literature Festival (here), but here we are again. Autumn in Cheltenham and Montpellier Gardens becomes home to book tents and coffee shops and hoards of book lovers, clutching their complimentary copies of the Times in their free cloth bags and clambering for a signed copy of Stephen Fry’s new memoir.

I am a long-time festival-goer, attending annually for about 7 or 8 years now. Seven years ago, there were two festivals a year (including a shorter event over the Easter weekend) and I would take several days off work, booking tickets for a packed itinerary of lectures, debates, readings and interviews. My favourites have always been what I call the “unknown quantities” – panels of 2 or 3 new writers, united by a single theme, reading from their first novel. They were always half price to under 25s (as I was then) and I discovered many new favourites at those events.

But I’ve also seen – and in some instances had the honour of meeting – some of my cultural heroes. Maya Angelou moved me to tears (I wasn’t the only one the room to be so overwhelmed by it all). I met and chatted with Douglas Coupland. I was star-struck and mumbled my name to a book-signing Sir Antony Sher. I shook the hand of Daniel Libeskind and, in that moment, made a big decision about my life. I was even (rather unexpectedly) won over by a charming Alan Carr.

This year, I was most excited about seeing director, author, producer, genius Guillermo del Toro and was gutted last week to receive a photocopied letter (in the post!) to inform festival-goers that he would no longer be appearing at the festival. But I remembered that the festival gems are always the low-key events and I went along with @AllyWickstead on Saturday with high hopes.

Our first event – ‘New Feminism’ author, Natasha Walter – was fascinating debate. The assertion that, as feminists, our new ‘enemy’ is other women – that in fact the sisterhood had turned on itself – was a convincing one and one which certainly had a lot of support in the auditorium (we were in the newly opened Parabola Arts Centre, part of the Cheltenham Ladies College, and what an excellent venue it is, too). We returned to the Parabola Arts Centre once again for what was billed as “chilling” exploration of Victorian and Edwardian ghost stories. It was certainly a lot of fun (I wouldn’t have liked to be the chairman who kept Martin Jarvis under control) but they tried to pack in too much for the audience to ever feel truly unnerved.

The 2010 festival is on for another week and, if you’re in the area, I highly recommend a visit.

What really struck me this year was how the festival has grown. I should say now that I have never attended Hay, though I have been in the town whilst the festival was on. Cheltenham clearly aspires to be Hay: the corporate sponsorship (The Times, Waterstones, Carte Noir, SkyArts), the radically different target audience (though I still find myself amongst the youngest adults in attendance), the big – usually political – hitters amongst those appearing on stage. This is not, by any means, a criticism and I am thrilled that the festival is thriving and growing because it means I can keep going for many more years to come.

If I’m honest though, I miss the days when the only events that took place were in the Town Hall and the book tent was a cramped marquee in which you could barely move for stacks of hardback books on any subject you could name. I would spend a small fortune in that tent. This year, I bought just three books:

• Natasha Walter’s ‘Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism’
• Mark Kermode’s ‘It’s Only A Movie’
• Deyan Sudjic’s biography of Norman Foster ‘A life in architecture’ (partly because the beautiful green of the dust jacket made up for the frankly hideous cover of Kermode’s book).

There were a few other books I picked up and put back down but, well… for one reason or another, the book-buying magic just wasn’t there for me this year.

Though it does mean I get to spend twice as much next year…

A list always helps

In order that I don’t throw up my hands in despair and sulk up to bed with a book, here is my Sunday plan:

1. Make a cup of tea
2. Complete assignment tasks 1b and 1c (by 3pm)
3. Make another cup of tea
4. Complete 1d and 2c (by 4pm)
5. Do an hour of ironing (essentials only – with cup of tea)
6. Text mum to tell her I don’t have time to call today (this was going to be ‘Call Mum’ but it looks like there’s no time)
7. Eat dinner
8. More ironing (with X Factor)
9. Bed

It’s a pretty ambitious plan, to be honest.

This.

New favourite song.

The video is a bit awesome too. It’s all about the bit from 1:37, when you can’t distinguish between laughing and crying for a moment.

(Yes AW, OC, RG – you’re getting this on your CDs. Lucky things!)

(Yes, it sounds a bit like Gnarls Barkley. What can I say?)

Happy Days

This video pretty much sums it up for me.

It’s how at ease I feel when I’m at a race meeting, how content I am, how exhilarating it can be. I’d forgotten that.

Though now I have that urge again to have my own bike.

My mum: What would you get?
Me: I think I’d like an R1.
My mum: How about you start with something smaller?

Ha. I wish I was 17 again, with no fear and plenty of disposable income.