movement

Hello blog! Back to the grindstone now - since last week all the buses came along at once (Clapham omnibus - see that's a cultural reference - which few here are familiar with & reminds me why I blog)

Anyway I signed a contract and received funds in my account all in the same week (plus it was my birthday - yeehaa!) Remarkable - since the contract was not for the big non-film jazz thing which will now take another couple of months to come through - but for a back burner script commission which has been under protracted discussion for nearly 18 months. In fact I'd rather lost faith that negotiations would ever get anywhere. Now I have to get on with it - hammer out a treatment in a week and a (brilliant) script plus revisions in a month (plus or minus) - just in time for Cannes. So after two months of faffing (well 'gentle contemplation') and tweaking my A5 booky thing, now have to get down to some real mental graft.

What else - was reading the Guardian tv blog to see how the No 1 Ladies' Detective Agency 2 hour TV movie was received in the UK and perhaps predictably the audience was completely split - loving or hating it - with little middle ground - and most criticism levelled at the representation of Africa. Here's one comment from 'unclephaester' directed at reviewer Sam Wollaston; "when Sam says that there aren't enough black people on TV, he means "his sort" of black people. Blacks who conform to Sam's stereotypes and not those of other people." Ha.

Still I hope the series is flighted here soon. Since my daughter was born, I've tended to favour light reads - stuff that takes only a day or two and the No 1 series certainly fits. I'm finishing the 2 most recent books now. Few people point out how funny the stories are. I'm drawn to the way women bamboozle folk (mainly naive men)- maybe it is recognition. When I first came to live in Cape Town, I was probably a bit green and would stand by, uncomplaining when one or other of my hub's 3 sisters arrived, marched into the kitchen, tasted the food cooking on the stove before pronouncing disparagingly on the flavour. In the early days, in Montana, imposing neighbours invited themselves in just to comment on the shape and colour of washing on the line. Some even demanded old newspapers or bottles from the domestic worker (without my knowledge)! Now I put my foot down.

I must be grown up.