Last summer, I was looking for wedding shoes and I found these green, cherry-tipped plastic heels by Vivienne Westwood. They were a hundred and something pounds, and I couldn’t imagine them as wedding shoes, even when I squinted, so I didn’t buy them, but I did put them to the back of my mind as something I might buy one day, when I had more money.

I don’t have more money, but it has just been payday, so I had a look on the internet and discovered, to my distress, that there are NO Vivienne Westwood green cherry-tipped plastic heels left anywhere in the world! Or at least, there’s one pair, but it’s a UK size 4 and I wear a UK size 7 (you know what they say about women with big feet? No, me neither), and I want a pair I can wear, not a pair I can only look at.

(I haven’t even mentioned the best thing about them, which is that they are bubblegum scented, just like Strawberry Shortcake dolls used to be. You honestly couldn’t design a more perfect shoe for me, unless you stuffed the toe with pizza.)

So I am putting a plea out there on the internet, folks, for a pair of them in a size 7. If you find them, please point me at them. I will make you cakes and write lovely things about you in return.

Glad All Over sort of started off as a blog about football, but now it’s more or less a blog about nothing, or if you prefer, a blog about everything (except theatre, because I write about that elsewhere, occasionally). I try to write impassioned, well-argued pieces on language and design and travel and food and music, but the posts which get the highest traffic are invariably about baby baboons or a swimming pool I’ve never been to. I’m not sure how I should feel about the fact that, in general, the fewer words a post has, the more views it gets. Perhaps I am more of a visual person.

As it happens, 2011 saw Glad All Over’s highest ever traffic, and 2012 has gotten off to a belter of a start, so thank you ever so much for reading, and if there’s anything in particular you would like me to write about, do please let me know. I will write about everything except for rugby, about which the only thing I can tell you is that it’s a highly technical game played by warriors (© the beloved).

Sorry, that’s a truly terrible title for this post, but I’m at work so I have to write quickly. I am lucky because my new office has lots of windows, and I honestly think that daylight helps you (or, at least, me) to concentrate, which is why I would always have a desk facing outwards if I could. But in the absence of that, and since the beloved is yet to write the bestselling novel which means neither of us will ever need to work again, the next best thing is probably this sky-mimicking ceiling lighting from (naturally) Germany. It’s €1,000 per square metre at the moment. Donations welcome.

And it wasn’t awful. There was lots to like about it: the casting is uniformly excellent and everybody does the best they can with the script. It looks good, and it sounds good, and it makes London look better than it does in real life.

But ugh, it’s so pleased with itself! The joy of the Conan Doyle stories comes from how clever Sherlock Holmes is, not how clever Arthur Conan Doyle is. It’s a small, but important, distinction. Sherlock is delighted by itself more than it is by the character, which makes it feel all wrong. I don’t want to be able to hear the programme-maker breathing down the back of my neck when I watch a drama, and watching this show I can feel him looming sweatily over me throughout.

(I’m not talking about anyone in particular here, but he is definitely a “he”. Drama on British TV is currently in the grip of a chummy group of clever-clever, white, middle-class men who are all jolly pleased with themselves and each other for being smarter than normal people. Unfortunately they are all quite good at making TV, damn them, but that doesn’t mean I have to like them.)

The problem the programme has, when it gets very overexcited about being clever, is twofold. Firstly, it loses sight of the beautiful simplicity that sits at the heart of the best Holmes stories. This show has more plot in ten minutes than an entire Conan Doyle novel. Secondly, if you’re going to be self-consciously clever, you’d better make sure that you are, in fact, being clever, and this is where Sherlock falls down for me. Quite apart from the dangling plot points and the baffling improbabilities, which flit by so fast that you can mostly ignore them, the show is terrifically excited about Technology, which somebody somewhere in the bowels of the BBC has clearly decided is going to be used as a Metaphor. The problem is, they haven’t bothered to get anyone with an actual grasp of the technology they’re talking about to act as an advisor on the show, with the result that we, the audience, are expected to be delighted by Feats of Technology which in real life are either ridiculously unimpressive or so improbable and unexplained as to be plain silly. Just as The Archers needs an agricultural story editor, Sherlock could have done with a technology advisor. And somebody should have sacked whoever decided to give Watson a “blog”. I put it in inverted commas because so do they, every time they mention it.

But that’s all nit-picking. What I really object to is the idea that the source material needs to be improved upon, when (a) it doesn’t, and (b) whatever description you might want to give of Sherlock, an improvement on the original is not it. At one point, during the entirely nonsensical denouement of last night’s show, Moriarty (wince-inducingly described in BBC1′s preamble as “Holmes’s ultimate nemesis”, as though you can have grades of nemesis) said to Holmes: “…that’s your weakness, you always want everything to be clever”. And I thought: you got it in one.

(I had a separate rant last night at the TV and the beloved about what they did with Moriarty, but since it included the words “postmodern” and “non-linear” I shan’t repeat it here, or we’ll both go away thinking I’m the most terrible kind of wanker.)

But photos and videos aren’t memories, are they? They’re not even aides-memoires, I don’t think, because once a slice of a memory is sealed up inside a photo, you lose the rest of it. So I think I remember my sixth birthday party, but when I examine the memory, all I can really remember is being in the back garden holding my birthday cake, and that’s because there’s a photo of it. I don’t really remember it at all. Perhaps I would, if there wasn’t a photo, but in the same way you don’t bother remembering anyone’s phone number now that you have them all stored on your mobile phone, if we think that photos are a substitute for the act of remembering something then we might not bother to remember it.

I have been to Cyprus twice, once a year ago and once about ten years ago. I can’t remember exactly when I went the first time, because there isn’t a set on Flickr labelled with the dates of the trip, but I do remember the vivid red of the flowers growing outside our apartment, and the way the swimming pool seemed to melt into the sea (I had never heard of infinity pools then, but I think it was one), and I can still feel, if I try, the slight chill in the air that arrived on our last day and made the locals laugh at us for sunbathing.

But when I think about last year’s trip, which at the time I remember thinking was the nicest holiday I’d ever been on, I just see the photos in my mind’s eye. And the problem with that is that what you decide is a good subject for a photo is not the same as what you independently recall later, because your conscious mind isn’t necessarily the best judge of what will appeal to your unconscious mind. So you get photos of the sunset (I have SO MANY photos of sunsets, and they all look EXACTLY THE SAME), and of each other grinning (DITTO), and of cocktails and feral cats, but you probably miss the groyne covered in barnacles, or the blood-red roof that stands out like a flag against a bright blue sky, and you certainly miss the chill in the air and the taste of kleftiko, unless you put your camera down for five minutes and let yourself be in the moment, rather than frantically trying to record a facsimile of the moment for posterity, when it’s never a substitute for the real thing.

Once in a while I forget to take my camera somewhere, and although I love taking photos and I love having photos, I’m sometimes secretly glad that I can forget about keeping a record, and just be where I am for a bit.

The ideal solution, I think, is to live your life as though cameras don’t exist, but have three dedicated photographers recording your every move, so that you end up with a beautifully random set of photos which may or may not tally with your own recollection of events. I managed this on my wedding day, but I haven’t worked out how to make it happen the rest of the time. I’ll keep you posted.

Dreams of a Life is the true (or “true”; the impossibility of arriving at an independent truth about another person being one of its central themes) story of Joyce Vincent, a young Londoner who died alone in her flat in Wood Green in 2003 and wasn’t discovered for three years. If that sounds harrowing, it is, but it’s also fascinating, and touching, and thoughtful, and ultimately life-affirming, if that isn’t too much of a contradiction in terms. What happened to Joyce was shocking, of course, but the film is as much about her life and love and friendships as about her death, and I came away with what felt like an intimate and tender portrait of someone quite a lot like you or me. It’s not like any other film I can think of, and I think it will stay with me for a long time.

Weekend is a love story – a romance in every sense, although again, it felt very close to home. Watching it, I thought – I know these people; I’ve been to these places. There is, I think, something very English about both films, which is part of what makes them feel so familiar. But you don’t have to be English, or live here, to recognise something fundamental in each of them, because they are about real people with real uncertainties and doubts and secrets, and both make the point that you can never really know another person’s secret. And they treat that truth with an honesty that makes both films seem very grown-up, in the best sense of the term. They are both made by people I’d like to know in real life, which is praise I’ve never used about a film before, not counting Woody Allen films (and people get cross when I say I’d like to know Woody Allen in real life, so I tend not to say it any more, even though it’s true).

There are no neatly wrapped-up endings to either film and both contain a lot of sadness, but I came away from them both feeling uplifted, perhaps because both stories are also about happiness, albeit transitory happiness (which is the only real kind, because if you were happy all the time you wouldn’t know you were happy, so it wouldn’t count).

Weekend has left most cinemas now, but you can probably still catch Dreams of a Life if you hurry. But they are also both the sort of film which would work just as well on TV, so one way or another, I hope you will get to see them.

Next up on my to-watch list: The Artist, about which I am ridiculously excited.

Back in Colchester, I was already in the habit of visiting the two secondhand bookshops on the High Street to look for cheaper copies of university text books (a hint to teenagers: art history is a very expensive subject to study, bookswise). The next time I was in town I went and had a look at the “Crime” shelf in the larger bookshop, the one inside someone’s house, and was delighted to discover dozens of aged Christies, all priced at 70p. I bought a handful, then periodically went back over the following weeks and months and acquired the lot. I discovered that I’d inadvertently struck gold the first time out and that not all the stories were as good as the early ones, but there was never one I didn’t enjoy reading.

Having gotten hold of about thirty books for pennies at a time, I was loath to start spending £6.99 a go on the remaining titles – it seemed somehow against the serendipitous spirit of the affair – and I found myself content to check every car boot sale, thrift store and charity shop I passed in the hope of picking up an unread Christie.

Last year, now the owner of two full bookshelves of battered Marples and Poirots, I arranged them in alphabetical order, found a list of her complete works and made a meticulous list of everything I didn’t yet have. Some of them, borrowed from friends or libraries or lost over the years, I had read but didn’t have a copy of, and I decided it would be lovely to have an absolutely complete set, not counting the romances which I find readable and entertaining but nothing like as exciting as the detective books and which in any case are written pseudonymously, so don’t technically count as Agatha Christies.

Using this more systematic approach I acquired a dozen or so more books, and of the remaining ones on the list some are US versions of books I already have, some are thrillers rather than mysteries (although the dividing line is not always clear, of course) and others are titles I know I have somewhere, but I can’t think where.

So what next? The answer is obvious: sign up for a book club offering brand new copies of every single Agatha Christie, sent out fortnightly at £5.99 a pop.

Yes, I know it sounds a bit mad, but in another piece of beautiful serendipity, I went into a newsagent yesterday to top up my Oyster and spotted a copy of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, complete with accompanying magazine, for £1.99. So naturally I bought it, and discovered that Hachette are republishing every single Christie, in hardback, in a facsimile of the original binding and cover art, accompanied by a magazine with contemporary detail and modern analysis of each story. Plus, you get free gifts – a bag, some mugs, glass coasters – if you subscribe, as well as the obligatory free binder with part two.

This is exciting for me, even though I’ve read almost all of the books, so it ought to be even more exciting for someone who hasn’t read the books and would like to, which is why I think you should also subscribe. £5.99 for a book is quite cheap, especially as the first one is £1.99, the second is £3.99 and the third is free (if you subscribe by post, rather than just buying it from the newsagent), AND you get a load of free stuff, AND the bindings are gorgeous, AND, well, Agatha Christie is just really lovely to read. The stories are so cleverly plotted and have been so ripe for TV and film and radio adaptation that it’s easy to forget that they are also beautiful evocations of an England – of a world – that few of us knew but which we can all recognise. And more than that, they provide an eloquent social history of a particular class of English life of which Christie herself was a part. So if your new year’s resolution was to read more, I think you should sign up now and join me in reading a Christie a fortnight in 2012. Sorry if this reads like an ad, it wasn’t meant to. Also, if you don’t want to subscribe but do want to try one of the stories and I know you in real life, let me know and I will pick one out for you and give it to you.

]]> http://gladallover.net/2012/01/04/agatha-christie/feed/ 0 elsiem http://gladallover.net/2011/12/30/new-years-resolutions-for-2012/ http://gladallover.net/2011/12/30/new-years-resolutions-for-2012/#comments Fri, 30 Dec 2011 14:06:54 +0000 elsiem http://gladallover.net/?p=1957 ]]> Looking back at last year’s resolutions, as I traditionally do at this time of year, I discover that I kept all of them, more or less. But it’s less impressive than that sounds, because there were only three and they were all kind of lame, apart from the first one which I am technically still working on, although I am definitely nearly finished.

Anyway, this year has needed no thought at all. I know exactly what I want to do, as well as the order I want to do it in. So without further preamble, my plans for 2012 are these:

1. Get the beloved to show me how to use Audacity.

2. Move Ella‘s two paintings out of the bedroom and into the front room, and hang the mirror we got from my sister over the mantelpiece (note: this will require the assistance of A Man. Not a man, but A Man, or quite possibly A Woman).

3. Hang up the paintings which are currently on the bedroom floor awaiting the removal of Ella’s paintings from the walls.

4. Upgrade to pro membership of the voice artists’ site to which I belong.

5. Throw away all the rusty old kitchen stuff that the previous occupants of our flat left behind, and;

6. Use the resultant cupboard space to reorganise our kitchen storage in such a way that we can find the things we need to use without having to empty whole cupboards at a time.

7. Audition for some voiceover jobs.

Seven is quite ambitious, I know, but only number 7 is anything but routine. It is also the most exciting one, so that’s OK. Oh, and number 8 is to finish writing that bloody story. It only needs about three more days’ work; I just can’t seem to get around to it. But I’m going to use a wedding, a house move and two changes of job as an excuse for not getting as far as I should have in 2011, and say that 2012 will absolutely, positively, without a shadow of a doubt, be the year it happens. Hold me to that, please.

(And in case I don’t make it back here tomorrow, happy new year! 2011 was the funnest year of blogging for me so far, so I hope you enjoyed at least some of it too.)

Donna and I used to work together, in the first proper job I ever had. Well, second, if you count four months doing 20 hours a week in Streatham Under Fives Centre, which I’m not sure I do. This job was in a bookshop, and in the late nineties and early two thousands Donna and I had the most fun anyone has ever had at work, because she is the sweetest, silliest, most genuine, forthright and hilarious person in the world, and spending eight hours a day in her company was sheer out-and-out delight.

When good things happened to Donna she would fill the room with beams of joy so intense they felt tangible. When bad things happened to Donna she would cry, then find a way to feel better about them, usually with the accompaniment of a lot of laughter. If I was in a bad mood, I would sit and glower silently. If Donna was in a bad mood, she’d announce it, explain it and within a few minutes we’d have talked around it from every angle and both be feeling better.

Everyone should have a Donna, especially if they are occasionally inclined to unhealthy levels of cynicism and negativity. Donna was so open and so engaged that I couldn’t sustain my sneering teenage posture, and had no choice but to become nicer, and for that I will always be grateful to her.

Happy Christmas, Donna! And happy Christmas to everyone who has read any of this year’s advent calendar. It’s been a lot of fun to do, and I’m only sorry that there wasn’t room for all the songs people nominated. But, you know, there’s always room for Cliff.