Anyway it is finally up and running now, and to celebrate, she is giving away a book, [...]]]> I haven’t done much writing this week. I’ve been helping my wife launch her new photography website, fotodisiac. I have learned more about CSS, mySQL databases, wp-config files and the like than I ever wanted to!

Anyway it is finally up and running now, and to celebrate, she is giving away a book, Tom Ang’s How to Photograph Absolutely Everything. To win the book, all you have to do is leave a comment on the site before this Sunday. Click here to enter.

Our Daily Bread

The Lives of [...]]]> I don’t normally review film on this site, and don’t plan to start. But I rent regularly from Lovefilm.com (for those of you reading in America, it’s a British version of Netflix), and have had a run of several really good films that I wanted to share with you:

Our Daily Bread

The Lives of Others

Black Gold

Vodka Lemon

Our Daily Bread is hard to describe without making it sound like what it’s not. I could call it a documentary about industrial food production, but it’s absolutely nothing like Fast Food Nation and those types of film. There’s no voiceover, no real argument, hardly any talking at all. For most of the movie, you are watching truly bizarre scenes of food production, in complete silence other than the buzz and thump of the machines. It’s like an extended art-museum video. The interest comes from the really odd subject matter – the combine harvester moving eerily across a broad field, the sometimes alien-looking scenes of unbelievable machines doing weird stuff to sweet peppers. There’s also some blood and gore, and some cute little fluffy yellow chicks being hurled into a machine and spat out into a vast battery-farm type shed. But it’s not so much an animal-rights movie. It focuses more on us, on the strange world we have created, and on the effect of this world on the people who work in it. Hard to describe, but it was an absorbing film to watch.

The Lives of Others is a really moving film about East Germany and the surveillance society, and it was particularly effective because the Stasi secret police are not presented as evil people but ordinary people operating within an evil system and adopting the usual human strategies of adaptation, compromise and occasional surreptitious acts of rebellion. I liked how it viewed the investigation of an intellectual from both sides simultaneously, the watcher and the watched, and my sympathies were split between them.

Black Gold is much more of a normal documentary film than Our Daily Bread, and it definitely does take sides, but the subject – the global coffee industry – is really compelling. It’s a familiar story of farmers in poor countries getting shafted and corporations making massive profits while pumping out PR about their largely imaginary ‘ethical’ policies. It succeeded in getting me outraged all over again, though.

Finally, Vodka Lemon is an Armenian film about a town slowly dying in post-Soviet Armenia. Snow falls constantly, and old people sit around drinking vodka and reminiscing while waiting desperately for their sons to send home money from richer countries like France. Again, it’s hard to explain why I liked it – not much happens, and it’s pretty relentlessly depressing. But it’s beautifully shot, with lots of wide open snowy landscapes increasing the sense of isolation and loss, and some good dry, pain-tinged comedy as an old man lugs a wardrobe halfway down a lonely road to sell it and a family argues over money for a new bride. I suppose part of it is that I like seeing new things, a new place that I’ve never seen before and a completely different way of life. It’s a very sad film but shot through with humour and lots of competing stories of human interest. Definitely a good film to watch.

A couple of nights ago I was travelling home in a taxi. Since I am [...]]]> Every now and then, I have a tendency to whine. I work too hard, life is tough, writing is difficult, etc etc. Also, every now and then, something happens to make me realise I have nothing whatsoever to complain about.

A couple of nights ago I was travelling home in a taxi. Since I am just starting out as a novelist, I have to do temp work to make ends meet, but do it at odd hours so that I am free during the day to write. At the moment I am working a 5pm to 1am shift. This, by the way, is the cause of a lot of my whining. Anyway, London being the modern, cosmopolitan city it is, all the trains have stopped running by then, so the company pays for me to take a cab home.

I was talking to my driver the other night and that’s where the perspective came in. You see, we’d both started work at the same time, but whereas I was going home to bed, he would be working right through to the morning. And whereas I had the weekend to look forward to, he worked seven days a week. Things have apparently got worse because of the credit crunch: whereas before he only worked about 60 hours a week, now he works more like 90. Just to spell it out, 60 hours is six 10-hour days; 90 hours is seven 13-hour days. And he still struggles to pay the mortgage and buy his kids all the things they need. From talking to other drivers, I know that he is far from exceptional. He works longer hours than most, but 12-hour shifts and working weekends are the norm for them. And the worst thing is that there are plenty of people in the world doing even worse jobs, people who would look on a London cab-driver with envy.

The result of all this: I feel like an idiot. Yes, I work long hours, but half of those hours are doing something I love – writing. I deliberately chose this kind of life because I wanted to be a writer. If I wanted to give it up, I could go back to journalism, or even to my original career as a corporate banker, or just stick with temping and enjoy having lots of spare time. In short, I am privileged. Why is it always so hard for me to remember that?

The good part is that, for this week at least, I stopped whining and was more productive than I have been for ages.