every day should be a susie day

Pshhhht’cooff

Posted on 09. Dec, 2008 by susie in books i've been reading, cooking, girl meets cake, other writers, telly

Oliver Postgate has died.  Like every Brit of a certain age, his was the voice of my childhood.  Smallfilms (Postgate, animator Peter Firmin, and various handy people who were good at knitting) made telly out of bits of string in a shed at the bottom of the garden, with such obvious love and care that I feel teary just thinking about it.  His imagination contributed every bit as much of my kidly fondness for stories as Blyton and Kipling and Dahl.

So, for your nostalgic viewing pleasure, here are the singing mice from Bagpuss,  the Welshest episode of Ivor the Engine ever, soup (and the soup dragon) with The Clangers (spillage at 6.40!), a glimpse of Nogbad from Noggin the Nog, and some magnificently scary-looking pictures from Tottie (which we used to mock mercilessly, but secretly I adored it).  Oh, I am a tiny person all over again, just listening to him…  Farewell, Post, you’ll not be forgot.

  I’ve mostly been reading unpublished things, which is fun except you can’t talk about them. :)  Am now on Andrea Levy’s Small Island, though, which is masterful.

  Proof-correction time for Girl Meets Cake!  I love this bit: it’s so nearly a book, and those final little tweaks and checks are amusing.  Though I’m dithering over a section where my girls greet each other with the always-friendly catalogue of insults (tart, whore, that kind of thing).  I know why I wrote it like that: there are legitimate, meaningful, textual reasons for those words to be there.  But Tina Fey’s character in Mean Girls bellows ‘Y’all have to stop calling each other sluts and whores, because it just makes it OK for guys to call you sluts and whores‘, and she has a point.  Decisions, decisions…

Visiting Narnia (well, nearly: sooo pretty), nearly killing myself with undercooked chicken (I knew there was a reason I used to be veggie), continuing my helpless obsession with Gilmore Girls, despite it being all twee and goofy.

Farewell Christopher Robin, 1669

Posted on 28. Jan, 2008 by susie in big woo, books i've been reading, kids' books i've been reading

I’m officially novelisting as the day job: hurrah! No more guided tours from me.

It was time to stop: I was starting to sound like Mark Gatiss doing the Stumphole Cavern sketch every time I talked about ceiling bosses. But I will miss being asked about architecture and history and where the toilets are, and quite often knowing the answers. I’ll miss the little ripple of laughter I always got from the obligatory Shakespeare anecdote. Above all I’ll miss being able to call this ‘the office’:

Kiddie deathlit: like buses, apparently. Second of the ‘three came along at once’ is Jenny Downham’s Before I Die (YA, hardback). Like Sam in Ways to Live Forever, Tessa has a list of things to achieve before her terminal illness wins – but Tessa is 16, so we’re into sex, drugs, rock and roll territory. There’s something mournfully pedestrian about Tessa’s list, and about her life in general, however extraordinary her circumstances: she’s an unflinchingly horrible teenage girl, whose real tragedy is that she’ll never live long enough to grow into the gentler, more interesting woman lurking beneath. Just as unflinching is her best friend, Zoey, retained because she’s the only girl in school selfish enough to ignore Tessa’s illness, yet utterly destructive to be around as a result (until she undergoes her own emotional renaissance). The prose is striking, recalling most the powerful simplicity of Mark Haddon’s Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. Sadly towards the close, it becomes overlong and repetitive, with an infuriatingly self-indulgent fifty pages at the end that makes you long, guiltily, for the inevitable. But it’s a memorable, if gruelling, read. I’d have some chocolate on standby if I were you.

Next up, The Bower Bird, about, er, a girl with a terminal illness. Then again, I did receive a certain adventure story with a glowing neon orange slipcover from Amazon just this morning…

Advice on how to not be daft online, for the endpages of Big Woo. Did you know that the internet is a train full of spidermonkey enthusiasts? No, I have no idea either.

Being a domestic goddess (minus the hoovering), gossiping wildly with my now-ex work colleagues, watching Primeval even though it’s awful, failing to go to the cinema.