There’s a fascinating article in Granta about the web habits of highly effective people. Being a literary tome, these people are all journalists, writers and bloggers, which suits me fine.

Novelist A.L. Kennedy says: “I don’t blog or Facebook. If I want to write, I’d rather do it to some kind of definable end.”

Wise words, no doubt. I’m sure there are definable ends within blogging and social networking but I somehow I don’t think pirate games on Facebook and blogging about South Park count.

(link via Mark Jones on Filtered Media).

Summer is here early in London. There are green leaves and flowers all over town, we’ve enjoyed beautiful sunshine for days on end, everyone is out enjoying picnics in the park, the pubs are doing a brisk trade in cider and Pimms (one of the quintessentially English signs of summer).

It’s actually unseasonally hot - it’s expected to peak at 26C today and I can well believe it. I think I must be acclimatised because, for the first time, I can understand the English male’s desire to take his shirt off when temperature climb around the high 20s.

I was out this morning, doing my Japan tour at the British Museum and having coffee and lunch with friends. Now I’m spending a relaxing afternoon at home, perusing the Sunday papers. This evening we’re catching up with Kimberley, who is in town briefly on holiday from her native Vancouver.

Last night we met with our friends Emme and Jon. We saw a movie at the ICA (Institute of Contemporary Arts) and then had a picnic in St James’ Park. The picnic was lovely - homemade sushi, salad and parsnip cake (like carrot cake but with a straight substitution of parsnips). It was a beautiful night and really great to catch up with our friends as we hadn’t seen them for a few months.

The movie, however, was awful - it was a Japanese film called Vexille - and it was probably the worst thing I’ve seen in a few years. I usually enjoy Japanese animé but I guess I’ve only seen the good stuff - this was a highly implausible and emotionally vacuous story with ridiculous plot holes and even more ridiculous dialogue. Also, they seem to have used the cut-and-paste job with the animation - the Americans look Japanese and the two main female characters are identical except for their hair and clothing.

I did see Iron Man the previous week and that was surprisingly good. Robert Downey Jr was superb in that role - utterly convincing. It’s not that Iron Man is any more plausible than Vexille when you get down to it but solid storytelling means you are willing to suspend your disbelief and that makes all the difference. It’s not going to change the world or win any prizes, but the characters are charismatic and believable, and it’s all round good fun.

Probably the best movie I’ve seen so far this year is Persepolis. It’s based on the graphic novel by Marjane Satrapi and it’s an autobiographical account of growing up in Tehran and Vienna during the Iranian Revolution.

The movie basically animates Satrapi’s drawings, so it has a very distinctive style and it’s mostly in black and white. The drawings appear very simple but are in no way crude - it really conveyed a wonderful sense of place and character. One of my favourite moments was when she went driving with a new boyfriend and the car sprouted wings and flew down the hill.

Iran is a fascinating place and this film gives you a wonderful peek behind the veil to see what real people in the country actually think and feel. Marjane was a wonderful character and I really liked her family as well, especially her cool granny. It was also just so sad because of how unfree Iranian society is, especially for women, and how many people live in exile and never see their families.

We saw this last weekend with Tash and Matt at the wonderful Everyman Cinema in Hampstead. You can buy single seats or sofas and order food and drinks from the ushers - what’s not to like?!

I did laugh when they played the trailers. Because it’s based on a graphic novel, the trailers were all for other comic book movies - Batman, Iron Man and so on. I wonder how many people in the cinema were really in the demographic for both Persepolis and Iron Man?

Actually, that would be the four of us… And I saw Iron Man last night and thought it was brilliant. But that’s a subject for another post.

I am blogging about my recent trip over on Roaming Tales. The most recent post is about Granada in Nicaragua, a beautiful colonial city on the shores of Lake Nicaragua. There is more to come, both from Nicaragua and Asia, so please subscribe to the Roaming Tales feed to keep up to date.

The blog posts have photos but you can see all my photos as they are uploaded on photo sharing site Flickr under user name Niltiac1.

In other news, I have started a cookery course at Leiths. We have made choux pastry, aubergine and prosciutto gougere and chocolate and cherry biscuits so far. I am blogging about that over on The Gooseberry Fool, so please subscribe if you are interested.

www.flickr.com Niltiac1’s Arvon course, Devon, April 2008 photoset

After my lovely food writing course at the Arvon Foundation last year, I really wanted to do one of their fiction courses.

One of my big goals this year is to edit my NaNoWriMo novel, which as you’ll recall, I wrote in 30 days. It’s been languishing in a drawer (or rather, elsewhere on my hard drive) ever since but as I was booked on an Arvon course in April, I knew that I would come back to it.

The week has been absolutely brilliant. Both the tutors (Alex Wheatle and Tiffany Murray) were great and there were some really talented fellow students on the course - I’m looking forward to reading 15 debut novels in the next few years! There was no internet and no mobile phone reception, which was great because the escape from work and blogs and friends and family really stripped away all the reasons not to write, while the beautiful surroundings and creative company inspired me to write. I feel really energised and inspired by my novel again and I have a bit of faith in the writing as well.

Arvon has several centres around England and Scotland but I returned to Totleigh Barton in Devon where the food writing course was also held. We stayed in a pre-Domesday farm house with a thatched roof deep in the countryside, near a village called Sheepwash. The site has been under continuous occupation since 1086 but probably several hundred years before that and the present building was built in the 16th century. It’s very quaint and full of random steps and low beams and secret passageways.

The countryside is very picturesque. It’s England as you’ve always imagined it - rolling green hills and cows and hedgerows. It’s a bit less cultivated and far less touristy than the Cotswolds. All the spring flowers are out and the shiny copper-backed pheasants are getting fat. I was told there were otters in the river and went down early to visit them. They weren’t at home but it was worthwhile because I saw a beautiful misty sunrise over frosty fields. We had four days of brilliant sunshine and the weather turned on the last day.

On Saturday, I met up with my friends Katrina and Dylan, who are temporarily living and working in Exeter. Unfortunately it was raining but we had a fun time driving around the local area, down to Dawlish and up to Dartmoor, and stopping for a cream tea along the way.

I’ve turned into Phileas Fogg, except intercontinental jets mean that my globe circumnavigation has taken only 30 days.

I left London on 8 March, almost exactly one month ago. Since then I have been to two states of Australia, the United States, Nicaragua, Hong Kong, Cambodia, Kuala Lumpur and Bangkok.

I realise Nicaragua and Thailand are opposite directions from Australia and yet I flew to Hong Kong and Bangkok via Nicaragua and the US. Crazy! It was for work, not pleasure.

Yes, I’m buying carbon offsets for the flights and yes, I know that’s a waste of time and money.

There has been a lot going on in my world. I shall try to blog again soon.

On Wednesday evening I met up with Dominique to go to see Speed-the-Plow at the Old Vic. Dom and I often see plays there together and we like to eat at the Hope & Anchor pub down the road afterwards. The Hope & Anchor is considered a “gastropub” and the food is certainly a cut above the average pub food, yet quite inexpensive too.

Speed-the-Plow is a David Mamet play about movie executives in Los Angeles. Mamet also wrote Glengarry Glen Ross about real estate agents and failure, which won the Pulitzer Prize and was turned into a movie starring Al Pacino, Jack Lemmon, Alec Baldwin and Kevin Spacey. Speed-the-Plow as a stageplay had a cast of just three, played by Spacey, Jeff Goldblum and Laura Michelle Kelly. It was similarly tight on running time - just one and half hours with no interval.

I don’t want to give too much plot detail away but the three acts are quite distinct, from the frenetic showmanship of act 1, to the pseudo-mysticism of act 2, and then, finally, act 3 where we actually get down to the nub of who the characters are and what makes them tick. It was hard to know what people’s true desires were at the beginning of the play but they are quite exposed by the end.

It was a fun play with lots of witty one-liners (”I believe in the Yellow Pages but I don’t want to make a movie about it”). There were also striking images, particularly with the height difference between Goldblum and Spacey (Goldblum’s lanky legs accentuated by his high-waisted trousers). However, I must say that act 3 was the best because it was the first time when I truly understood the stakes and what I was watching.

Natalie reached the big three-oh this week and last night she celebrated in style in a private room at a bar in Soho called LVPO (pronounced Lupo and meaning “wolf”). There was much dancing and merriment, fuelled by the specially commissioned “Natalka” cocktail and the antics of a hired balloon contortionist. I’m looking forward to seeing the photos - I had a rocking horse hat, and we also had fairy princesses, ghostbusters, monkeys, ladybirds, and aliens. Great fun!

Tash also had a birthday recently. She was whisked away on a surprise romantic weekend to Bath by her boyfriend for her birthday but celebrated with her mates the following week, by taking us to Hell Pizza in Fulham. It’s a New Zealand pizza chain and I have written about it on The Gooseberry Fool.

Since I have just spent two or so weeks in Brooklyn, it is fitting that when I arrived home to London a copy of Betty Smith’s classic novel A Tree Grows in Brooklyn was waiting on my doorstep. It was a BookCrossing copy, and had come to me from the US via Canada and the UK and will be winging its way to Portugal next.

This is the tale of the Francie Nolan and her family, growing up poor in early 20th century Brooklyn. It’s a portrait of the poor people of Brooklyn and of Francie herself, an intelligent, imaginative child. The dogged determination of the tree growing up towards the sunlight, no matter what the obstacles, is a poignant metaphor for Francie’s coming of age. The writing has a deft but light touch and interesting in the way that it does not progress in a strictly linear fashion.

It reminded me a fair bit of Ruth Park’s The Harp in the South, which is set in the slums of inner-city Sydney during the Great Depression. It’s also about a poor Irish immigrant family in the new world and the challenges and prejudices they face, although it’s set about 20-30 years later than A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and in a different city, on a different continent.

The setting is Brooklyn, mostly Williamsburg and a bit of Greenpoint in north Brooklyn. This area is now very trendy, populated with young urban hipsters and also a large Hasidic Jew population. I spent a little time there and this was where the fabulous Queen’s Hideaway restaurant is. However, I stayed mostly in south Brooklyn, around the Cobble Hill and Carroll Gardens area.

This is part of my challenge to read the top 100 books of the 20th century. All previous entries are on this site, and also on a dedicated site Century of Books. I’ve read 15 from the list since I started and I’m now at 40, with 60 to go.