Katyboo1’s Weblog

I’m writing this now because I’m using it as a delaying tactic.  I have just been reading an article about Derek Jarman, who is about to be remembered (some of us never forgot), in a new exhibition at the Serpentine in London.  Derek Jarman is one of my all time favourite people ever.  I am very excited about the exhibition, and am trying to plan a way that I can shoehorn a day in London into my schedule without anyone noticing. 

I did think about going in half term and taking the children, but I’m not sure how it would go.  Sometimes they’re utterly brilliant and really get into things like that.  Other times they whinge and moan a lot and demand to be entertained.  It’s a fine line, and frankly it could go either way.  I don’t think I dare risk it, as if I go all that way to worship at the feet of Derek and they throw a massive wobbler, I would be forced to kill them stone dead.  It would be awful to be arrested in an art gallery.  Derek would probably approve, but my mother would be really cross, and she’d be the one stumping up the bail money.  I suppose I could claim it was a performance piece, but I don’t think anyone would buy it.

I was also reading about some of his films and have now filled my Amazon shopping cart to the brim.  This is a bad thing, and so I thought I would mosey along to the blog to try and talk myself out of pressing the ‘Oohh! Yes! Buy! Buy! Buy!’ button.  It might work.  And then again it might not.  I’ve had a bad morning.  I woke up with sinusitis again, and then spent forty minutes in Tilly’s school assembly waiting for them to award her with a merit certificate, only to find they had cocked it up and despite the glowing letter of recommendation they sent me, they had forgotten her award. 

I spent forty minutes, forty minutes, of my precious life watching other children being patronised to death by the new head mistress who had a very overbearing bosom, a ridiculous turn of phrase and a penchant for wearing what looks like a dead fox around her neck.  I was not impressed.  When such things happen I immediately reach for the solace of Amazon.  I can feel my finger twitching over the ‘buy’ button even as we speak.

Talking of dead foxes, I may have mentioned this before, but what the hell.  When I was very small we went on holiday to the seaside and my parents took me into an antique shop, as is their wont.  I fell in love with a fox fur stole.  It still had its head, legs and tail, and was dyed black.  It had beady glass eyes and a hard little snout, and I loved it.  I kicked up such a fuss, that for some bizarre reason my parents caved in and bought it for me (why they never did that with the Sindy Swimming Pool, which I would have much preferred, I don’t know).  Anyway, I called it Ferdinand, and I wore it for months on end, driving my parents bonkers because they had an eccentric child with a dead fox round her neck to cart around with them everywhere.  It’s hard to explain to people, even with the best will in the world.  Thank goodness PETA had never got as far as our small village by then.  I’d have been strung up on the village green as an example.

Eventually, as you do, I got bored of Ferdinand.  I remember cutting his paws off and using them for pillows in my dolls house beds.  It was macabre but very practical.  I don’t know what happened to the rest of him.  I expect once my mother saw the mutilation in progress she swiftly dumped him in the dustbin, worried about what uses I would put the rest of him to.  Thinking about it, it’s very odd, because I recall winning a furry monkey from the fairground at one point after Ferdinand’s demise.  It was a bit of rabbit fur stapled to a bit of foam, with a plastic monkey’s face on the end.  It was truly hideous, and naturally, I absolutely adored it.  I used to love the feel of the fur against my face, and would spend hours snuggling cheek to cheek with the creature. 

My mother decided it was unhygienic.  She went out and bought a Paddington Bear, bear, and offered me a trade off, bear for monkey.  I eventually caved, after many misgivings, and she threw the monkey in the bin.  I was devastated, and sobbed that I had changed my mind, but the lady was not for turning.  She said that she was very pleased she had got rid of it because it was nasty and unsanitary.  Why she didn’t say that about the very, very old dead fox that I’d been wearing round my neck for months on end, is a mystery.  I must ask her about it.  It smacks of double standards to me…

Anyway, to get back to the world of Derek.  The problem with Derek’s films is that they are very obscure and very ‘arty’, so they don’t get shown on terrestrial television very often.  They are often quite rude and a bit too ‘gaytastic’ for some as well.  It doesn’t bother me, I’m all for it, but people like foxy headmistress would be bound to get upset about such things, so I have to wait for three years and then remember to set the Sky Plus for half four in the morning if I want to catch one of his films.  I can just see it now.  Me and a load of gay men in silk dressing gowns and bed socks, propping our eyelids open and waiting with horlicks in hand, all for a peek at the majesty of Derek.  Maybe we could form a society of which I could be an honorary member.  Give it a few years until I start limbering up for the menopause and I’m sure I’ll be able to grow a handle bar moustache.  I wonder if I’m a gay man trapped inside a middle aged woman’s body?  That would work…

Sky Arts screened Wittgenstein a few months ago, which was excellent, but such things are as rare as hens’ teeth.  With the retrospective coming up, and a new documentary narrated by Tilda Swinton being shown on More 4 on February 19th, there is a chance they might show some of his other stuff, so maybe it would be politic to wait and see if I can record some stuff before I spend the life savings I don’t have on films that nobody else but me will want to watch!  It’s a lonely life when two of your all time super heroes are Derek Jarman and Julian Cope.  It’s never dull though.

My main filmic desire is for a DVD copy of Blue, his final film.  I had a copy on video, but don’t own a video recorder any more.  Actually, what would be best would be a sound recording, but there isn’t one.  I’ve checked.  It’s the most amazing thing.  It’s a film which is just a bright blue screen, with voices, nothing else.  It’s so moving and brilliant I can’t quite describe it.  Jarman had aids, and as he was dying he began to lose his sight, which for an artist and film maker was devastating.  Blue is his last film, and celebrates his life and what colour means, and what it means to die.  It’s wonderful.

Jason is horrified that I could even contemplate watching such a thing.  He thought Nick Hornby’s ‘About A Boy’ was too arty and pretentious, so I haven’t even broached the subject of Derek yet.  I think the main problem Jason would have with Blue is that there aren’t enough ninjas in it!  The car chases are quite few and far between as well.  Action is not one of its strong points to be fair.  My dad would naturally be concerned about the fact that it is too wordy!

Anyway.  I shall move swiftly on and try to distract myself with other things.  I must just comment on more stuff from televisionland.  Jason and I watched Ashes to Ashes, the sequel to the spectacularly brilliant Life on Mars last night.  Hmmmm! Is what I have to say.  It’s a bit weird.  I think it might all go horribly wrong, but I’m afraid I shall have to keep watching because Gene Hunt is still utterly brilliant, even if he is being very self conscious about it this time around.  For those of you who don’t know what the hell I’m talking about, here’s a run down.

Basically, in Life on Mars, the great and glorious John Simm played a detective called Sam Tyler, who was involved in a hideous accident.  This accident puts him into a coma.  He ‘wakes up’ in 1974 (or 73, can’t quite remember the year), remembering who he is, but not having a clue why he is suddenly in the early seventies.  Everyone in the seventies seems to be expecting him, and nobody but him thinks he is out of place.  He can’t work out whether he’s dead, whether he’s in a coma induced trauma state, or whether he has actually travelled back in time.  He joins forces with the Maverick cop ‘Gene Hunt’ played by Philip ‘I’m ‘avin ‘oops’ Glenister, and television genius is made.  This programme lasted for two series and was totally brilliant, but ended very definitely.

Because it was so brilliant, the writers have resurrected it, which is a bit worrying.  Keeley Hawes plays the modern detective, Alex Drake, who is a psychologist.  She gets shot in a hostage situation and wakes up in 1982 to meet Gene Hunt who has now been seconded to London, and is battling coke lords to the sounds of New Romantic pop madness.  She knows what’s going on, because she has Sam’s transcripts of his experiences, but doesn’t know how to get home.

Bits of it were very funny, and there were several horrendous eighties flash backs that were part nostalgia, part terror, but it’s all a bit too knowing.  One good thing is that where Mars was very Sweeney’esque, this is a great parody of Miami Vice set in London’s squalor, and instead of the sleek Don Johnson with his mauve t-shirts and espadrilles you’ve got burly northerners with Kevin Keegan perms shouting about being ‘armed bastards!’  That works quite well.  I think Don Johnson may have been more credible if he’d had a Kevin Keegan perm, or maybe not…

So, that’s about it really.  I have to spend the rest of the day avoiding buying things and trying to get to grips with more Shakespeare.  I have already had three cups of coffee and a biscuit boost with added guarana (always makes me think of bat pooh), so you think I’d be dancing about on the ceiling by now.  As it is, I can hardly keep my eyes open.  If I hadn’t had those things I’d probably be in a coma myself.  It would be just my luck to wake up in 1597, just as the plague was about to sweep the nation. I’d probably be some poor and destituted weevil picker living in a bog just outside Swindon (if Swindon even existed in those days, which I doubt.  See, not everything about Tudor times was bad) with my eighteen illegitimate children, all of whom would be snotty, smelly and consumptive.  I am not made for glamour.  I must accept my lot, and my snot.