The Week in T.V

Like most people I know, I don’t watch a lot of ‘live’ T.V.  Instead, I clog my recorder up with hours of television that I rarely get around to watching, watch a few things on ‘catch-up’ or whatever my package provider calls it, a few shows on Netflix, Amazon Prime and Now T.V. So, it is slightly inaccurate to call this post ‘a week in T.V’, it would be more apt to term it; ‘My week of viewing’.

First up, a thing that was actually on live T.V last week: 

Upstart Crow

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07bp62s

Written by Ben Elton, starring David Mitchell. A comedy about Shakespeare trying to break through in his early career.

So far, quite likeable and funny. I saw David Mitchell being interviewed by Richard Herring last year, for one of Herring’s Leicester Square podcasts:

https://www.comedy.co.uk/podcasts/richard_herring_lst_podcast/episode_94_david_mitchell/

Mitchell was talking about this upcoming project and, when he found out that it was penned by Ben Elton, Richard Herring asked;

“Is it shit?”

Mitchell handled the question with good grace, I thought, and said that he hoped not. He also said that Ben Elton was very aware that that was what people were saying about his recent output.

My first impressions, of the program, are that the cast are very good: particularly David Mitchell, and (rather surprisingly) Liza Tarbuck. It is very similar to Blackadder (which to my mind is no bad thing) - the character that Mark Heap plays could almost be brother to Stephen Fry’s Melchett in Blackadder II. I'm not really sure what they’re trying to do with the ‘Ricky Gervais’ character; the actor who has made it big in Italy. That particular joke could wear very thin but overall the program isn't bad. There are clever jokes about Shakespeare letting Christopher Marlowe pass off Shakespeare's plays as his own but I'm not sure whether that would alienate the audience or draw them in. There are also plenty of what Elton calls his 'knob gags', or in this case, gags about men playing women and shoving coconuts down their dresses.

I also tried to watch Love, Nina

But I'm afraid I fell asleep, not because it was boring but because I was exhausted. I read the book this was based on and really loved it; (Love, Nina by Nina Stibbe) about a nanny in the 1980s who works for Mary Kay Wilmers - editor of the London Review of Books. In the book, Alan Bennett comes round regularly for dinner and helps to fix a broken washing machine. The family borrow drills from Jonathan Miller and various other ‘famous’ literary neighbours make appearances. The ‘Nina’ of the letters is unimpressed and tells her sister that she thinks Alan Bennett ‘used to be in Coronation Street’! There is no ‘Alan Bennett’ character in the T.V adaptation, instead there is a dour, humourless Scottish writer. I can’t really write a review of how that works as I only saw about ten minutes of the program but one of the joyful things about the book was that, whenever one of the characters tried to be nasty about someone or pass on some scandalous gossip about one of their neighbours, Alan Bennett would interject, like a character from one of his own works, with something dampeningly mundane! I can’t help but think that the exclusion of the Alan Bennett 'character' would be to the detriment of the program.

Now, to move on to something not on general T.V, I'm going to talk about Girls

http://www.hbo.com/girls

Created and written by Lena Dunham, this program follows a group of twenty-somethings and their travails through life in New York. This program could, potentially, be intensely annoying; the characters are narcissistic, relatively affluent and, often, not very nice, but I found it totally addictive. I've just watched it up to the end of season 5 and they haven’t released season 6 yet. 

There we have one of the double-edged joys about modern T.V viewing - binge watching! All well and good when you are so captivated by a program that you just have to download one last episode before you go to bed but then you find you have vacuumed it all up and you have nothing left to watch. You are left feeling bereft (well, you are if you are me, anyway). And just why is Girls so addictive? I think, for me, it is the pull of the central character, Hannah Horvath, played by Dunham herself. Hannah is a writer, sometimes successful, often hapless and usually, despite her narcissism, self-aware. And, in almost every episode, Hannah is partially or completely naked and this is brilliant and this is brilliant because Hannah/Lena doesn't look like a Hollywood star. Hannah looks like a regular human woman; she is slightly chubby, her breasts are smaller than her hips and she is covered in tattoos.

It is so refreshing to see a ‘normal’ looking woman having sex on T.V. I read an article once where it said that we are so used to seeing ‘beautiful’ people shagging on film that it made the rest of us mere mortals feel that we didn't have the right to a sex life. Compare this to the recent T.V adaptation of John Le Carre’s The Night Manager (which I loved, BTW) where the two leads looked like Greek gods and displayed some pretty impressive thigh muscle control in their sexual shenanigans.

I guess that was in context, the characters were supposed to be beautiful; they are described so in the book (also brilliant) but it is kind of cool to see someone who doesn't look like a mythical being getting their kit off. So, thanks for that, Lena Dunham! And thank you, Nancy, for recommending Girls to me - you are right, I loved it!

One thing that I’ve been watching in an ‘old school’ way; as each episode is released and as soon as it’s been released, to avoid spoilers, is Game of Thrones. Obviously I can’t say too much about this, to avoid spoiling it for my *cough* multitude of readers...but I, too, have been affected by the...er, revival of a certain character and the reunion of certain family members and the magically uplifting and anti-ageing properties of a certain necklace….

Anyway, Game of Thrones has often been criticised for its gratuitous sex scenes and, (mainly female) nudity and it led me to think - why is the nudity acceptable (to me) in Girls but rather tiresome in GOT? It’s not just because Lena Dunham looks normal and the women in GOT look like Marvel comic women. Is it about plot? Girls is about relationships and sex, whereas Thrones is about….war, intrigue, other stuff...so the sex often seems tacked on and unnecessary. 

I think that my objection to the amount of female nudity in GOT is that, to my mind, it makes the women seem exposed and vulnerable. After all, it is even used as a punishment, in one of the episodes for one of the characters, to walk through the streets, naked, and get pelted with rotten vegetables! (I know that this scene comes from the actual books so don’t take me to task on that). There is definitely something to be said about power play, in an environment where the men remain clothed and the women are naked. GOT often looks like a mediaeval lap-dancing club! 

The notable exception to this, *spoiler!* I'm sure the program makers and the actor, Emilia Clarke, would argue, would be the character Daenerys Targaryen’s recent triumph, where she burns down the place of her captors and stands, magnificent, before its people, naked, with a striking backdrop of flames. In this context, Daenerys' nudity makes her look powerful and is symbolic of (another) rebirth.

I feel that there is something political about Lena Dunham’s nudity in Girls: look at me, she seems to be saying, I don’t fit in with Western society’s supposed ideal of beauty but I still have a right to display my body. There is definitely something empowering about that.

National Vegetarian week

I have to come clean here - I'm not a ‘proper’ vegetarian. I eat fish, I'm a pescatarian or a ‘fish-n-chip-acrit’ as someone (a ‘proper’ vegetarian) called me. But, it's National Vegetarian week, and, although I'm not preachy about it (how can I be? I'm not even a fully fledged veggie), I thought I’d compile a list of the ten best vegetarian dishes.

Humus - or, if you're buying it from Tesco, 'houmous'. Smooth and garlciky - even non vegetarians seem to like it!

Imam Bayildi: a very tasty Turkish dish (although I first tasted it in Greece!) made with aubergines. Here is a recipe:http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/oct/10/aubergine-recipes-turkish-imam-bayildi-hungkar-begendi-roast-with-tarator-yotam-ottolenghi I have made it and it wasn't too fiddly.

Tandoori paneer - A good one for a BBQ and a very pleasant alternative to a veggie burger. You marinate the paneer (Indian cheese which seems to be available in most big supermarkets now) in Tandoori spices (by which I mean a pack of ready made spices), yogurt and lemon juice. Paneer is quite robust and will keep its shape when cooked so you can skewer it with some peppers, mushrooms etc, drizzle it with oil and voilà! You'll be the envy of all the carnivores, eating their boring, blood drenched, badly cooked meat!

Aloo Gobi: potato and cauliflower curry, I like it when the spuds are slightly mushy but the cauliflower isn't!

Mary Berry’s canapés; made with vegetarian pesto, I actually made these ones, pictured below. Here's the recipe: http://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/tomato_and_goats_cheese_46597 But, oops, this is a BBC recipe so won't be available for long, best print it out now and put it in your recipe folder! (I don't have one either)

Baked Camembert/Brie. Stud the cheese with garlic cloves and thyme and pour a little white wine over, bake and you get a delicious dip for crudités and bread.

Goat’s cheese tart - if this is the only vegetarian option in a pub I'm quite happy, especially if it comes with beetroot and/or onion marmalade.

Portobello mushroom burger with Monterey jack cheese and pesto mayonnaise.

Vegetable Paella: the more vegetables the better - artichokes, peppers, mushrooms. Nice with a Spanish chick pea stew.

Tofu in a black bean sauce - from a Chinese takeaway, they seem to be doing a lot more tofu options now, but beware rogue bits of meat. If you make it yourself you have to squidge every last bit of moisture from that tofu. Marinated tofu is great if you can get hold of it but very salty.

Not included on the list:

Risotto - a plate of slop - not nearly as nice as a paella, not sure why...

Vegetable lasagne - not that bad, if it's home made but the frozen kind is hideous.

Not a vegetable lasagne!

Bean burger - bit too stodgy for my taste, probably a lot nicer if you make it yourself.

Surprisingly easy recipes:

Smoked tofu hash - I first had this in Vienna. Someone warned me that it was really hard to find veggie food there so I printed off a list of vegetarian/veggie friendly restaurants before we went and had the some of the best veggie food I'd ever eaten! One of the first things I had was smoked tofu hash, here is a recipe: http://vegannook.com/recipe/smoked-tofu-and-sweet-red-pepper-hash

Bruschetta - just make sure that your tomatoes are nice and ripe and that you season it well.

Frozen jacket spud - years ago, I moved in with my boyfriend (he was later to become my husband - reader, I ….) I was cooking and asked him to buy a jar of sauce with which to make a chilli, to which this troublesome blighter replied - ‘I don’t really believe in using jars’. Thus began a strict regimen of cooking everything from f-ing scratch. To be fair to him - (the food dictator) he did do most of the cooking but sometimes, all I wanted to do was have a simple supper of beans on toast. We didn't have a freezer, so couldn't do any batch cooking and far too much cooking (and cleaning up) went on for my liking. Anyway, since we’ve had kids it’s been jar central around here - curry sauces, those Amoy, chow mein sauce sachets, ready meals, the lot! Things have moved on a great deal from the bad old days, though, when we had the first sprog we lived on biscuits and pot noodles until we got ourselves sorted, I’ve never felt so unhealthy! Now we have a freezer and it’s brilliant! I’m a huge fan of the frozen jacket potato - it doesn’t even feel that unhealthy, ditto frozen, cooked rice. There are probably those of you out there who love cooking and are appalled by this but surely a frozen jacket - or ‘fro-joe’ as we like to call it in our house, isn’t the most heinous thing imaginable. If you can’t be arsed to cook you could do a lot worse than a fro-joe with some proper butter.

The Gratitude Journal

I have to apologise in advance; there is no way of writing about this without it all sounding a bit icky and sentimental. Even the name - ‘gratitude journal’, sounds revoltingly Californian and New agey. Indeed, it was an American friend of mine who first introduced me to the concept of the ‘gratitude journal’  when she presented me with a beautiful, embossed, A4 notebook, many years ago and told me what she intended me to use it for. As a writer (I've dropped the ‘aspiring’ prefix now, goddammit I'm a writer!) I love notebooks but I was a bit perturbed to find that this friend expected me to fill this one with three things a day that I felt grateful for, rather than the terribly earnest poetry I was in the habit of producing! I think I managed about 3 days of it. ‘I feel more like keeping an ‘ingratitude journal’ I told her once. She chuckled obligingly. It didn't come naturally to me, this gratitude lark, being a natural cynic and something of a miserablist. But years later I've had cause to revisit the concept. I wanted to see if it would help put things into perspective and make me, dare I say it, happier.

The good thing about the gratitude journal is that, while social media is reminding you of all the things you can’t afford, are unable to do and weren't invited to, the journal forces you to think about all the things you can do and do have in your life.

Years ago, I was watching a program about depression, with my family.  This documentary followed three different people, looking into their past, their histories and their general attitude to life. One thing stuck out for me and I've always remembered it. One of the subjects was a woman who was just turning 30. On her birthday they filmed her taking delivery of a massive bunch of flowers - a gift from her friends, they then showed her collecting her post from the doormat;

“Only four cards”.

She said, disconsolately.

‘Ah, but she got that bunch of flowers.’

My brother observed.

And I thought - yes, she is focussing on the negative, she should have been delighted that someone was thoughtful enough to organise a delivery of a bouquet for her - many people wouldn't even get that, but instead she is choosing to dwell on the paucity of her cards. I'm not judging her; I identified with that attitude! The looking for the sting rather than the honey. Not that I'm I suggesting that depression is just a state of mind that you can ‘snap out of’ if you just try and see the bright side, I just think that it is probably a common feature for people, depressed or not, to focus on what they don’t have. Of course, as human beings, we are built to strive but if we get too bogged down by all the things that (we think) are lacking, we may lose the energy to even try.  

Half empty or half full?

When I wrote the ‘Road to Happiness’ blog post:

http://msmuddles.blogspot.co.uk/2016/04/the-road-to-happiness.html

One of the things I left out of the ‘how to be happy’ list was ‘count your blessings’. After a week of keeping the gratitude journal, it had actually worked! The things I put in the journal really do range from the transcendental to the tooth-numbingly mundane. I don't really feel that I can share them here because they are so embarrassing! And yet I've shared so much on here. O.K, so one of my reasons to be grateful was finding some frozen, cooked potatoes in the freezer that made preparing dinner easier, that evening! (I did warn you that some of them were mundane) Of course I put more deeper, meaningful things in the journal but they really are too personal. What I found was, that if I filled in the journal at the end of the day, if I was feeling stressed, listing the positives made me feel more relaxed and that can only be a good thing.

I guess I should check back in on this topic and tell you whether I'm still keeping the journal in a year’s time. (And if it's still working.)

Look at this picture of the river - even when it's raining it still looks lovely. (Something to be grateful for...)

Summer Clothes

British Summer Time -  Has it been and gone now? Was that it?? (Yes, I know that, technically, it's still Spring, so don't come plaguing me with your pedantry!)

I don’t know if you've noticed, Reader, but I am trying to alternate the heavy-going blog posts with more frivolous, light hearted ones. Hence, a post about depression, followed by one on biscuits...It’s a bit like alternating heavy-going, Russian literature with a bit of chic-lit. Or, in my case, following up the magical realism of Like Water for Chocolate (Laura Esquivel); where the bitter disappointment one of the characters experiences when the man she loves marries her sister, is transferred into the wedding cake she makes for them, leading the whole wedding party to projectile vomit everywhere, with the plain, old realism of The Night Manager (John Le Carre).

So, anyway, I thought I might write about that, sometimes tricky, transition from full -on winter clobber to summer clothes. What to wear when you’re not sure what the weather is going to do. Men - I will try and do a male version of my personal choices for your benefit :)

Transition clothes:

1. The cropped trouser.

I don’t know what it is about cropped leg trousers that makes them a bit problematic (for me). On paper, they sound ideal; loose, modest (if that’s what you’re looking for), time saving - you’d only have to shave half your calf but I find them horrendously unflattering. Perhaps it’s all to do with balance - they give you a boxy, rectangular shape which is only emphasised and thrown into relief by your skinny ankles.

I bought these last week: £18 from Next.

Bargain , I thought, but only if I actually wear them… They looked nice when I tried them on in the shop and I liked the slightly shimmery effect of the material, but when I put them on the other day, they gave me a look of an overstuffed sausage!
They do cropped trousers for men too...I've yet to see some that look really nice but feel free to prove me wrong.

2) The wide-leg, floaty trouser.

These get my hearty seal of approval, they are graceful and flattering (at least, I like to think they are). They are also relatively cool and perfect for days like yesterday when it was scorchio at lunch time, but raining in the afternoon. I joined my friend for lunch and we sat on a log, in a clearing and ate in the blazing sunshine! This lovely, lush, green area in (one of) my places of work, always reminds me of that bit in Twilight where R-Patz and Kristen Stewart are lying in a meadow and he's glittering away like a candied almond. Here it is (where we sat: not the location from Twilight):

(I was a bit obsessed with Twilight when it first came out and with R-Patz (Robert Pattinson) - I don't know which is more shameful, the film obsession or the actor one...)

Anyway, the log was ever so slightly damp and I did feel it seeping through to my summer trousers but said trousers then served me very well when I was walking home, a few hours later, in the puttering rain. Floaty trousers = perfect for British Summer Time! They can take you smoothly from sunshine to rain with minimum discomfort.

Men: you could go for some light, linen trousers instead.

However, when it’s really scorching so then you might want to progress to:

3) The long skirt:

If you don’t quite want to get your pins out but need a bit of a breeze. 

I bought this one last year in the Monsoon sale - half price!

(Men, you might want to sport the long, cargo pant.)

But if it’s really hot then you could move on to:

4) The on-the-knee, A-line skirt.

(I couldn't be bothered to iron it)

Denim isn't the coolest fabric but sometimes a thick fabric can be a bit more flattering than a thin, clingy one.

Combat shorts for the blokes.

5) The Summer dress

Some fashion magazines make bold claims for ‘the dress that will suit everyone’! Really? Is there such a thing? Perhaps they should have a ‘a dress to suit everyone’, as in a different one for different body shapes and tastes (am I being a body fascist in saying this, though? By all means, if you want to wear a skin-tight, gold lurex tube, then please go ahead, regardless of body shape).

I went through a phase, as a teenager, of always wearing a jacket, even when it was scorching outside! I wasn't even fat, I just wanted to hide my bum. People really should be able to wear whatever they want. What I tend to do is find a dress shape that I think suits and stick to it, oh so rigidly, hence the reason that most of mine look the same! This is a recent purchase:

Originally £25, reduced to £15 from New Look. Most of my dresses are black and white and am trying to buy different colours, this is a slight foray into a different category in that it is black and...er sort of pink-ish and green, so there you go

Going back to the Twilight movie (do we have to? Yes, we do) it features a very good soundtrack, including one of my favourite songs by Radiohead, so I'll just leave you with that:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7UKu8s84S0

The Critical Gaze

This is a post about body image. It’s been a lifelong preoccupation of mine and something that takes up far too much head-space for many women (and men). As such, should I even be writing about it? I think, yes, because I believe that you have to examine something and explore it, before you can move on. I'm not writing this from the standpoint of someone who is totally at peace with their body, far from it. I'm just trying to challenge the way in which I/we view our bodies.

I started last month with the determination to lose some weight and my reasons were twofold. 1) I think I must be one of the only people who has actually managed to put on weight AFTER Christmas, and I'm seeing a worrying slide into the ‘overweight’ category of the NHS BMI height/weight charts.  2) A family party is imminent and, as I keep quipping to my friends, ‘there are going to be all these judgemental old, women, looking at my arse!’ Of the two reasons for wanting to reduce in size,  the second one is rather unsound. (Plus, I realise it’s a bit mean describing the guests as a group of ‘judgemental old women').

Watch any decent teen movie and the message is clear: be yourself, don’t try and fit in with the group, discover who you true friends are and don’t latch onto that insecure group of bullies/bitches. (Unless you watch Grease - which seems to be giving you the opposite message - take up smoking to fit in with your peers and put on some tight, silky trousers!).

How easy, though, is it to be your own person, without worrying about what other people think? We are social animals, tribal beings. Are we able to disregard the (imagined) mutterings of the wider community?

I was struck, when I read Stephen Fry’s autobiography - More Fool Me, Michael Joseph, 2014, by the fact that whenever he talked about any of his creative projects, he always imagined a (hypothetical) hyper-critical, scathing review from Time Out magazine. This impacted on me because I often imagine a hectoring Greek chorus of censure and criticism accompanying anything I post on social media. It was strange reading that someone so successful could also be so insecure. Of course, Fry’s mental health issues have been well documented but I imagined (perhaps naively) that in his professional life, he’d be more confident. Maybe everyone does that - imagines a hostile and unkind response, to anything we've put any effort into. In this frightening age of the Twitter troll, perhaps this isn't such a paranoid notion. But the right thing to do would be to pay it no heed - right? Just carry on regardless.

Do we also imagine a critical, hostile audience judging us for the way we look, too?

I stumbled across this article from The Elephant Journal last year:

http://www.elephantjournal.com/2015/04/loving-our-bodies-in-the-face-of-fear/

The basic gist of the article is that we can’t control what other people think of us and that when we focus on our supposed flaws, we magnify them. If we get can them ‘fixed’, our insecurity simply moves on to another focus point (seen in people who are addicted to plastic surgery). What we really need to do is reach a level of self-acceptance.

We may have received a lot of criticism for our appearance when we were growing up but I’d be willing to bet that, as an adult, our harshest critic is ourselves. Just think about what you say to yourself when you look in the mirror - do you ever throw a barrage of abuse at your reflection?

We spend far too long worrying about what is ‘wrong’ with our bodies and not nearly enough thinking about all the positive things it does for us; recovering from illnesses, carrying babies, winning races, taking us along charity runs, taking us up the stairs!

Our bodies are so much more than how they look.

I wonder if all that sounds too abstract?

Around 5 years ago, before I had my first child, I suffered from an ectopic pregnancy. (A pregnancy that is not in the uterus. The large majority (95%) of ectopic pregnancies occur in the Fallopian tube.) We had been ‘trying for a baby’ for a year and the day I discovered that I was pregnant - with a very faint plus sign in the pregnancy test window, was the same day that I started bleeding, and it was discovered that it was an ectopic pregnancy. I was devastated, I grieved but I also felt a deep sense of guilt and shame. It was my fault, or, specifically, it was the fault of my defective body!

‘You must stop blaming yourself and your body for what has happened to you’ - One of the moderators from the Ectopic Pregnancy Trust told me, in response to one of my posts on their website. Easier said than done.

What usually happens with an ectopic pregnancy is that the fallopian tube bursts open, leading to excruciating pain and the woman having to have emergency surgery to remove the tube. My case was slightly different in that the pregnancy dispersed on its own and my hormone levels were closely monitored for a few weeks until they went down enough to indicate that the pregnancy had gone (this treatment is called 'expectant management'). I had to go to the hospital every two days to have a blood test and was told to call an ambulance if I suddenly suffered excruciating pain! I bled, heavily, all that time, it was a grim, painful and drawn-out process but what happened was that, eventually,  my body effectively healed itself. I wouldn't wish the experience on anyone but it did prompt a sea change in the way that I viewed my body. With the help of some therapy (yep, that again) I began to see my body, not as a faulty, unreliable (and grotesque) machine but rather as a highly efficient mechanism that, when things had gone wrong had saved my life (E.P can be very dangerous). It had successfully dealt with the unviable pregnancy on it’s own, without need of surgical or medical intervention and I felt grateful towards it. The only other time I had felt anything approaching this was when I was training for a charity run, years before. Look at my long, efficient legs, I’d thought, running away! (yes, I know that sounds a bit bizarre and narcissistic). I’d never felt like that before.

So, I just want to reiterate the need for us to focus on when our bodies served us well, and be less preoccupied by how they look. Yes, I wrote a blog post about losing weight:

http://msmuddles.blogspot.co.uk/2015/11/the-weighty-issue-part-two-goal-weight.html

But I believe that before you can make any sort of major change in your life, you have to come from a place of happiness and acceptance. So, paradoxical as it may sound, if you want to reduce your weight, you have to approach it from a point of feeling kind of happy and accepting towards your body, rather than filled with loathing for it.

As I said, I'm not writing this from a pinnacle of Zen-like forbearance but I'm hoping to get there one day ;)

So, going back to those (hypothetical) judgemental, old women* that I spoke of earlier; perhaps, of the two motives for wanting to lose weight, it would be better to concentrate more on the desire to slide back into the ‘healthy’ section of the BMI chart than to appease the imaginary critics.

*I should also note that the 'judgmental old women', whilst being based on past experience, are actually a collective figment of my imagination and embody my own feelings of insecurity. Just as Stephen Fry's 'Time Out' critic was a projection of his own feelings of self doubt!