I went to see this Tudor potboiler the other week. Most disappointing. Not only because Scarlett Johanssen is intrinsically annoying in that ‘I’m so passive which is why men love me’ kind of way but also because the film had a horrid and fatal flaw: we were supposed to swallow the notion that Henry VIII did NOT LOVE the witty, intelligent, accomplished and challenging Anne Boleyn. No, he preferred her ‘I’m so good and passive which is why men love me’ sister Mary. He was just sexually obsessed with Anne because she played hard ball and didn’t let him shag her. I just can’t bring myself to believe that. I NEEDED him to love her. If it’s going to be about sex then at least let us see some – cf La Reine Margot. This was chock full of simpering SOFT FOCUS when he slept with PASSIVE MARY and a 12a suitable rape/buggery scene when he finally consumates the relationship with EVIL FEISTY ANNE. Because that’s all a bad girl deserves.

Also, I wonder if Scarlett J is one of the botox babes Johann Hari writes about? She seems a little young but what else accounts for that implausible stillness of being the pervades her vacant visage? Apparently Hollywood acting standards have plummeted because none of the actresses can move their faces. Really, it’s a genuine issue in Tinseltown.

Anyway, I can’t be arsed to review it, it’s that bad, but this sums it up nicely.

Inspired by the lovely Scarlett’s new blog I decided to add a splash of colour to the site. Scarlett writes about gardening on her allotment and uploads images of sexy Italian seed packets. She is also growing her hair as long as is possible, which appears to be quite long.

Readers of the blag will know why this little number caught my eye! Yes, it’s a routemaster which is an icon in its own right and a personal emblem of my life as a little Londoner climbing onto the yellow-lit bus with my mummy when all and everything was right with the world. It’s also a 28 which was the bus that shuttled me to a new universe when I went to sixth form college and discovered West London. The girls I met there had clothing allowances and went shopping on the King’s Road as an activity – like volleyball or reading. It was all terribly glamorous to my eye, which although sharp enough after years of training at St John’s Wood jumble sales back in the day when old ladies really did throw out Hardy Amies dresses, had never seen so many shiny and unaffordable things.

Anyway, back to Sunday afternoon in South London. Yemisi had come by to interview me for a podcast he’s making for the National Association of Literature Development. We spent the day geeking about blogs and blogging until our minds bloggled and it was time to catch the Victoria Line up to Tottenham to see Aoife Mannix’s excellent and gleamingly polished one-woman show Growing Up An Alien at the Bernie Arts Grant Centre (I just couldn’t seem to say it any other way and it would be rather wonderful wouldn’t it?) in which she shakes up the story of her life in a snow dome.

Yem went off to have roast chicken and rice and peas round at his sisters and after the performance I congregated with Malika Buddy and friends in the bar and spent a good twenty minutes ordering curry goat from a bemused and remarkably patient French waiter. On the way to the tube we stopped by the grocers to buy pumpkin for Miss Fast-Lane who was suffering period pain. She planned to cook it up with sauted onions and brussells sprouts, a strategy that everybody concurred was radical.

One of the things Yem said he likes about Blag Lady is the way the stories often come full circle. I like that too, so there was a wonderful sense of serendipity when sitting on the Victoria line heading south I looked up at the girl opposite me and noticed she was carrying a rather divine bag. I didn’t get a pic – tut tut – but it was oversized, a blue-grey woven leather the colour of the sea in Suffolk on a showery April afternoon, with perfect chestnut brown handles. When I asked the girl where she’d got it her eyes lit up: ‘oh this old thing…I picked it up in a charity shop.’ I should explain here for the uninitiated that there is NOTHING more satisfying to a seasoned shopper than having a stranger on the street/tube/bus enquire about the provenance of one of your best bargain buys that is also a charity shop one-off…it’s basically hitting the jackpot.

That made me feel good, in a blag-bag-lady camaraderie kind of way, a sort of My Name is Earl karma-credit in reverse. Nice.

Just skimmed through this on my mate Yemisi Blake’s blog. He’s busy getting his degree right now so didn’t have time to post on this subject so I thought I’d add in my tuppence ha’penny’s worth. The basic story is this: white girl writes and passes off memoir as a mixed-race Native American girl who was a drug runner for LA gang the Bloods, gets published by Penguin, exposed; book and tour are subsequently cancelled and she will never eat lunch in this town again.

I just read William Boyd’s Any Human Heart: an excellent fake memoir cunningly disguised as an excellent novel. Which begs the question, why bother to fake a memoir when you could write a perfectly good novel? Or even just straight non-fiction? There’s a back against the wall interview with her yakking on about providing a voice for the disenfranchised and raising the issue in the public eye. The word ‘bollocks’ springs, energetically, to mind.

Truth versus fiction comes up a lot in poetry: where the boundaries are intrinsically blurred. Bad cop [tor]mentor would always say ‘yeah, so what if it’s true? It’s the truth of the poem that counts, not whether that incident “actually happened”.’ Yes. I couldn’t agree more. Fact is often stranger than fiction, and if it doesn’t ring true then lie. On the page. But it is the betrayal of personal trust – between author and reader, author and editor, author and subject – that smarts. It hurts when people lie to us and you can tell that her editor, who worked closely with her for three years, really feels the sting.

Yet, there is something in us that likes the ‘based on a shocking true story’ factor. It is the inner desire for narrative ‘truth’ that created the urban myth: ‘it REALLY happened – no word of a lie, mate’. And perhaps the voracious public appetite for grizzled, car crash memoir a la Pelzer et al and its fairground mirror image that is the Britney/Amy/Pete media frenzy. That and the vicarious thrill of seeing someone else fuck up/get fucked.

Whatever, the fact is this stuff sells: far far more than your average non-fiction social tract where a first timer would probably count themselves lucky to see a $5000 advance rather than the infintely more palatable ‘under $100,000′ figure that the article quotes. Her bankability as a ‘marketable’ author rockets through the roof if the tales of guns and gang banging are true, far more ‘meeja fodder’ n’est pas?’ And let’s face it, would she have been able to convince an agent and editor that a middle class white girl from a ‘nice’ school on the right side of tracks could write about the ‘hood’ with any authority however clever the prose? Far easier just to go the whole hog.

Having just discovered that the ‘going rate’ for ad hoc online content is apparently two and a half pence per word there’s part of me that thinks ‘I can’t say I blame her’. These are hard times for writers hoping to bag a crust from the pen. Even Dickens was paid a penny a word! and a penny went a lot further in 1870. No ‘100 Ways to Get Good at Golf’ is hardly Great Expectations. But let’s face it, at least everybody knows that nothing you read on the internet is TRUE.

PS. do click through on that last link: it is my new favourite waste of time.

We got on the train and found we had been allocated table seats. What good luck. The only thing that could be better was if our friends who were also on the train, but didn’t book with us, had reservations in the same carriage. They were seated right behind us. The passengers who might have shared the table with us didn’t turn up so we had the table between the four of us, plus extra seats behind just for our coats and bags. What good luck.

First of three dead rabbits spreadeagled on the South West Coast Path.

Then our neighbours in the opposite table seat in the coach arrived. A man in a black leather jacket with jeans, a backpack and numerous tattoos was joined by a tall bloke and boy of around 14 who had a skateboarder look going on. He swung a carrierbag over to the guy in the leather jacket with the earring. They sat down and as soon as they were settled dipped into the bag, pulled out two cans of Special Brew, two Bacardi Breezers/Smirnoff Ice (I say A, Dr Blog says B), two Costa Coffee paper cups and a plastic Jif Lemon. Then they set about preparing their cocktails which they used to wash down three yellow pills that they passed surreptitiously across the table. The boy cracked open a Fanta.

What good luck. A travelling circus to keep us amused for the duration. ‘They’ve just done three pills,’ I mouthed across the table. The train left the station and we waited for them to get rowdy, but in fact we were the noisy ones with our Guardian Quick Crossword while they flicked through the Metro quietly. Tall Bloke picked up his phone and called his ex: he was down for the weekend and could look after little Lisa. No he didn’t have any cash, only money for food. Somewhere between Exeter and St Awful an accident occured and a Costa Coffee cup full of Breezer Brew/Special Smirnoff pooled over the table.

‘God that stinks,’ muttered one of our companions, Playfair, as we helped mop up the mess with the Mirror.

‘Maybe the lemon juice will get rid of the stink,’ I suggested. Leather Jacket, who I had down as the leader, agreed and they set about sprucing up the table. In no time at all they had remixed another drink and it was as if the spillage had never happened. Leather Jacket left the carriage, returned to his seat and nodded off. Tall Bloke then set about calling a number of dealers loudly: London was dry, they couldn’t wait to get home.

Tall Bloke borrowed a pen to write down a number and dutifully returned it with thanks. Later, perhaps encouraged by our now cordial if arms length relationship, Leather Jacket looked up from the window seat where he was texting.

‘Excuse me, um can any of you guys tell me how to spell – um ball? You know -’, he added, as our faces froze, ‘as in keep your eye on the ball.’

I then failed not to laugh and laughed because the tension of not laughing was too much. No it is not nice to laugh at people who ask you how to spell ball, but it was just as much the look on our Guardian Quick Crossword faces. Playfair covered it up nicely by throwing out a quick quip so we could all titter politely while Patricia duly obliged: ‘yes, that’s b-a-l-l’.

Not long after they started getting ready to disembark. Leather Jacket was not doing well by this stage, his bag got caught in the seat and he was having trouble keeping his balance.

‘Come on mate,’ boomed Tall Bloke, supporting his friend by the elbow as he staggered down the aisle ‘don’t you worry, well soon have some drugs down ya.’

Then they got off leaving us their copy of the Daily Mail and a lengthy debate ensued. Were they junkies or simply disaffected rural dyslexics who liked to get trashed in a downmarket version of the crusty Pills-Magners-Coke-Ketamine kind of way? Were we hypocritical bourgeoisie who looked down on their Special Brew yet silently condoned celebrity Cristal and crack-fests or our own forays into what we deemed respectable recreational oblivion? Playfair, who subscribes to Radical Philosophy and was the proponent of the underprivileged-rural-dyslexic theory said she didn’t think they had those hard junkie faces and even though I found it hard to believe they weren’t junkies – what about all those trips to the loo and the nodding off? – there was something about that concept which rang true. Neither men had that ‘I haven’t evacuated my bowels in a fortnight’ walk.

Many other questions remained unanswered. Would little Lisa go down for the weekend? What drugs would they score and when? Were the trips to the loo really just fag breaks as Playfair maintained? Did they neck Es or was it sleeping pills? Was the fourteen-year-old boy Leather Jacket’s son or step-son? Why were we so interested anyway? (See pic above.) And what else did that text say apart from ball?