Yarmouth the Great

I’m away in Great Yarmouth for our 3rd year film project. We’re lucky enough to film at the Hippodrome, an old circus building by the sea. It’s a beautiful building but it has a certain polar quality! It is very, very cold in here, to the extent of many layers & mittens indoors. Before filming anything there is the unhappy prospect of changing into costume. The last thing I want to do is take off layers!

We’re filming duologues from existing plays & films & linking them all together as an open audition for a new drama called Suburban Gothic. On Day 1 we filmed auditions in the circus ring. I was doing a monologue from ‘Trainspotting’ the play. Today I’m filming a duologue from ‘Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind’. It was meant to happen at 12.30 yesterday & then got moved four times to the end of the day & then to today so I couldn’t get the train home I booked last night…:( That was crap because we’re not staying near our film location, we’re in Lowestoft, about 20 mins drive away. It’s the home of the UK’s most easterly point (I believe there’s a plaque or something to prove it, though I haven’t had the chance to have a little nose about) & a rather tasty Chinese takeaway that did me a nice veggie curry, but nothing else other than frostbite. I’ve been spooning in a bed with my friend, wearing serious layers & my little red beret. We just can’t warm up, any of us!

I’ve had a wander down the beach twice, once with stromy grey clouds, the other with a pretty blue sky where you could see the wind farm not too far out in the water. The piers have been renamed “jettymarrans” & we’ll be damned if nobody wins those teddy-grabbing-claw arcade games!

I Scream, We Scream

I love a bit of Half-Baked. I love seeking out the white chocolatey polar bears in the Baked Alaska. I like Ben & Jerry’s fun over Hagen Daz any day.

Freggo recently opened off Regent St here in London, & I deeply want to take a silly o’clock in the a.m. trip specifically for ice cream.

You know it’s a good day when you eat your first ice-cream of the summer, but it’s oddly satisfying to go for an ice-cream during an especially cold night. But I must warn you, mittens + melty cream is a sticky situation to be avoided!

Novel Novels

These are The Observer’s Top 100 Novels. As I progressed down the list I grew ashamed of the few starred titles I have read, despite their greatness. I felt smaller still coming across a title & thinking “Huh? What’s that?” Shame on me. Oh well, lots to keep me busy then. I personally there are many books that are missing from my favourites … I needs a plan to get me a library card!

Don Quixote – Miguel De Cervantes
The Pilgrim’s Progress – John Bunyan
Robinson Crusoe – Daniel Defoe
Gulliver’s Travels – Jonathan Swift
Tom Jones – Henry Fielding
Clarissa – Samuel Richardson
Tristram Shandy – Laurence Sterne
Dangerous Liaisons – Pierre Choderlos De Laclos
Emma – Jane Austen *
Frankenstein – Mary Shelley*
Nightmare Abbey – Thomas Love
The Black Sheep – Honore De Balzac
The Charterhouse of Parma – Stendhal
The Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
Sybil – Benjamin Disraeli
David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte *
Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
The Scarlet Letter – Nathaniel Hawthorne*
Moby Dick – Herman Melville
Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll *
Little Women – Louisa M. Alcott
The Way We Live Now – Anthony Trollope
Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
Daniel Deronda – George Eliot
The Brothers Karamazov – Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Portrait of a Lady – Henry James
Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde – Robert Louis Stevenson *
Three Men in a Boat – Jerome K. Jerome
The Picture of Dorian Gray – Oscar Wilde *
The Diary of a Nobody – George Grossmith
Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
The Riddle of the Sands – Erskine Childers
The Call of the Wild – Jack London*
Nostromo – Joseph Conrad
The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame *
In Search of Lost Time – Marcel Proust
The Rainbow – D.H. Lawrence
The Good Soldier – Ford Madox Ford
The Thirty-Nine Steps – John Buchan
Ulysses – James Joyce
Mrs. Dalloway – Virginia Woolf
A Passage to India – E.M. Forster
The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald *
The Trial – Franz Kafka
Men Without Women – Ernest Hemingway
Journey to the End of the Night – Louis-Ferdinand Celine
As I Lay Dying – William Faulkner
Brave New World – Aldous Huxley*
Scoop – Evelyn Waugh
USA – John Dos Passos
The Big Sleep – Raymond Chandler
The Pursuit of Love – Nancy Mitford
The Plague – Albert Camus
Nineteen Eighty-Four – George Orwell *
Malone Dies – Samuel Beckett
Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger *
Wise Blood – Flannery O’Connor
Charlotte’s Web – E.B. White *
The Lord of the Rings – J.R.R. Tolkien *
Lucky Jim – Kingsley Amis
Lord of the Flies – William Golding *
The Quiet American – Graham Greene
On the Road – Jack Kerouac
Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
The Tin Drum – Gunter Grass
Things Fall Apart – Chinua Achebe
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie – Muriel Spark
To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee *
Catch-22 – Joseph Heller *
Herzog – Saul Bellow *
One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez *
Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont – Elizabeth Taylor
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy – John Le Carre
Song of Solomon – Toni Morrison
The Bottle Factory Outing – Beryla Bainbridge
The Executioner’s Song – Norman Mailer
If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler – Italo Calvino
A Bend in the River – V.S. Naipaul
Waiting for the Barbarians – J.M. Coetzee
Housekeeping – Marilynne Robinson
Lanark – Alasdair Gray
The New York Trilogy – Paul Auster
The BFG – Roald Dahl *
The Periodic Table – Primo Levi
Money – Martin Amis
An Artist of the Floating World – Kazuo Ishiguro
Oscar and Lucinda – Peter Carey *
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting – Milan Kundera
Haroun and the Sea of Stories – Salman Rushdie
LA Confidential – James Ellroy
Wise Children – Angela Carter
Atonement – Ian McEwan
Northern Lights – Philip Pullman *
American Pastoral – Philip Roth
Austerlitz – W.G. Sebald

Sparkle Sparkle

Who is That Masked Girl?

My friend is having a Masquerade party for her birthday. Okay, the dress code just states wear a mask, you don’t have to go whole hog, but I’d like to have a special mask. Currently I have a plain black mask from a few Halloweens ago and a box of glitter & craft materials I might have a play with. Then I’ll have the perfect disguise…evil laugh of glee!

No Kidding Lambykins!

Essential accessory…a cute barn- yard friend!

Thinking of the Z

So, my big sis is getting married! Hurrah! Here’s some stuff that makes me think, “Aw, that’d be lovely jubbly for Z to see!” Even if I wanted her to get married on a carousel, and that might have been gently swept aside!

Pretty things for a pretty person!

Happy Headwear

I wish I had a crown of flowers to wear jauntily on the crown of my head so I could pretend I was in Fantasia, or A Midsummer Night’s Dream (there’s a deep, deep love for the Dream!) & if it’s good enough for Kirsten Dunst’s Marie Antoinette, then it’s good enough for lil’ old me, who occassionally like a lil’ bit of cake. Mmmm flower crown plus cake is my new happy thought!

I would like today to feel like…

Home Boarded Home

A man came today – only after a 3 day wait – & boarded up my window. Literally shabby chic, homeless vibe! But so much warmer!