To Offer or Not to Offer?

During my daily morning bond with the armpits of a resident of West London, I was stunned to notice a woman standing next to me, also communing intimately with a stranger. This being the Central Line at 8.30am , it was not in itself unusual, except that the woman was pregnant. I don't mean a little bit pregnant: I mean it looked as though there was a full grown person in there, never mind a full grown baby. You could not miss this stomach. Except, apparently, if you were one of the people happily sitting down, ignoring the woman who looked ready to drop in more ways than one. I was appalled.

A couple of days later, however, I'd made the heinous mistake of wearing heels to work. That evening I hobbled onto the tube and fell gratefully onto a seat only to be confronted by that horror of horrors... a protruding tummy . A few throbbing toes won't stand in my way of feeling superior; but as I started to jump (with a tiny scream) to my feet... I halted in panic as it occurred to me - was the offending tummy protruding enough? Was the bulge in question caused by the seat-deserving state of growing a person - or was it just a bit of a tummy with an owner who most likely wouldn't appreciate a hobbling stranger pointing out her distant acquaintance with crunches?

I stared, willing the bulge to somehow confirm whether or not it contained a very small person. It did no such thing. With horror, I realized that its owner had noticed my interest. Was she pregnant and judging me for not giving her my seat? Did she realize I thought she was pregnant but wasn't at all and was now planning to start a diet that night? Or was she just wondering why on earth a stranger was staring at her middle region with such a pained expression? What was I doing to this poor woman?

If you were recently disconcerted by a brunette (wearing great, if evil, shoes) staring at you, then please accept my apologies. But might I ask if in future you'd be willing to wear a small but legible badge proclaiming whether or not you would like a seat? That's not unreasonable… is it?

Leaving on a Jet Plane... or Not...

I’ve been feeling a bit awful about the environment. Recently, the news has been saturated with dire predictions of global warming and accusing all of us who fly regularly of killing off Third World crops and murdering polar bears. I’m not too bad, as far as environmental conscience goes: I don’t drive, nor leave my cell phone charger plugged in or TV on standby and I faithfully recycle (I even set an ex up with a friend recently). But the flying thing, I can’t get past. Last year, I went on no less than 16 plane journeys (counting the outbound and return as two), none of them really necessary if we are to be strict about it. Travel is the greatest passion in my life, I sometimes feel overwhelmed by how much of the globe I have yet to see. But if my zipping off with my seatbelt on whenever seated in case of unexpected turbulence is going to destroy parts of the globe I have yet to see, maybe I should just stay at home and sit quietly on my hands? When it comes to long haul travel, it’s not as though there is much choice. The quickest way to get to Australia while remaining in contact with Earth is by cargo ship (which doesn’t sound to me as though it’d have movies or individual chocolates with a cup of tea) and it takes at least 36 days. 36 days! My plans for 2007 do include a trip Down Under, but try as I might, I can’t find a spare couple of months for the journey there and back.

The worst part is, it’s not even as though I enjoy flying - I generally see it as a necessary evil between me and wherever I want to go. I am not a very good air passenger. During my outbound flight to Australia last summer, I got out of my seat in an attempt to alleviate claustrophobia, asked one of the cabin crew for some iced water and promptly fainted in the aisle, spectacularly depositing the iced water over an unfortunate row of people. Which doesn’t even compare to the time I was on my way to Vancouver, happily glugging back litres of water in an attempt to attain peachy perfect skin despite the 9 ½ hours in a pressurised cabin, when we hit some turbulence. Fairly bad turbulence, bad enough to necessitate the seat belt light going on for 40 minutes. Which is a long time by anyone’s standards, but trust me, it’s an eternity when you’ve just gulped no less than 2 litres of water. Finally, having resorted to undoing my jeans to ease the mountainous pressure on my bladder and squirming like never before, the seat belt light flicked off and I dashed out of my seat like, as they say, a bat out of hell. Relief was sweet - but also brief as the seat belt light flicked back on seconds after I’d sat down, and seconds after that, the plane plummeted so sharply that I was catapulted off the toilet and slammed in to the door with such force that I saw stars and my nose started to bleed. Which was bad enough, until I remind you what activity I’d been engaged in before the world fell from under me, and share that blood wasn’t the only bodily fluid lavishly sprayed all over the cubicle and my clothes. When I was about five, I wet myself at school and was sent home with my knickers in a paper bag, but never had I experienced sitting through the remaining four hours of the flight, an inevitable interrogation at Canadian Immigration then a taxi to my apartment in the West End in the same state. As I stared around with an indescribable horror, there was a knock on the door and a member of the cabin crew helpfully informed me that I had to go back to my seat as “we were experiencing some turbulence.” In the end, I got through the flight, the airport, and the taxi home… wearing a pair of pyjamas from First Class. Which is probably the closest I’ll ever get to flying First Class.

So anyway. I’ve decided to give up short-haul flights. The rail system on the continent is fantastic, in fact, I’ve worked out that if you include journey to and from the airport, plus all the checking-in and security rigmarole, it’ll only take me a couple more hours to reach my parents’ in Geneva by Eurostar and TGV from Paris. Whether that will really do enough to reduce my carbon foot print I can’t be sure, but at least I will get to finish the journey wearing my own clothes.

My Nemesis, He-Man

A few years ago, I made up my mind that I was going to be a screenwriter. The first thing that occurred to me to do - before anything mad like doing some writing - was to ring up Channel 4 and introduce myself. No, I don't know why either. On my lunch break one day, I rang up from my mobile and a very nice person actually took the time to speak to me. Naturally enough, one of her first questions was what I had written. Naturally enough, I pretended I had just seen a car crash and hung up on her. While it might have been a great moment for my non-existent acting career (I understand that people who can fake witnessing car crashes are much in demand) it probably wasn't a fabulous start to my writing one. In fact, it was the most mortifying moment I'd experienced since He-Man ruined my Highland dancing career in 1985. (At the end of term, each of us had dance a presentation piece to the teachers to show what we'd learnt. Displaying a flair for the dramatic that suggested my future talent as a pretend car-crash witness, I borrowed my little brother's He-Man swords to use in my routine in the hope that the teachers would think I had figured out the Sword Dance on my own. Tragically, during the dance, I skidded, kicked the 'on' switch on the sword and had to finish the routine with red flashing skulls at my feet and a tinny voice proclaiming " MASTERS OF THE UUNNIIVVEEEEEERSEEEE" over the hi-diddly Highland dance music. When it became clear that the teachers had noticed - the tears streaming down their faces was probably the first clue - I skipped straight out of the room and as far as Miss MacDonald's Wee Dancers of Kilmacolm are aware, have never been seen again.)

However. I am no longer six, and I am still a screenwriter. I had a reading of my current screenplay at Script tank the other week. Script tank is a fantastic group, consisting primarily of drama writers from various forms of media, who get together once every two weeks to hear a script read by professional actors and then tear it apart. When I say tear it apart, I generally mean tear it apart - we can be brutal. Constructively brutal, but brutal all the same. You'll forgive me then, I hope, if I confess that I was a bit nervous about the reading. I've had my work read, even performed, plenty times now and while it is always a bit disconcerting to hear a story that once existed safely within the four walls of my brain being uttered aloud by actors to a room full of people, you do get used to it. Generally though, scripts don't have readings until fairly late in their development - so by the time the actors have at it, the script, or at least outlines, will already have been read and critiqued by a few people. This time, for the first time, it was a first draft that was read. It isn't easy to describe the sensation of a project being thrust directly, kicking and screaming, from my immagination right into a roomful of people. It was terrifying.

All things considered though, it didn't go over too badly - the consensus seemed to be that it had potential... just needed a lot of work to reach it. Which is about right for a first draft, really. I have a clear idea of what I have to do with it, and feel as though it will be worth it when I do. The problem is, finding the time. I've learned that there are enough waking hours in the day to achieve any two of:
a) earn money
b) have a life
c) write speculatively
But not all three at the same time. At the moment, my life consists of juggling the three, doing my best to manage two-and-a-bit most days, which is just the way it is for the time being - until I manage to invent a time stretching device. If anyone knows of such a time stretching device, do let me know.