Mrs Lard Goes To Hollywood

I’ve started to realise that I’m not much of a blogger. In fact, I’m a bad blogger.

Even worse, it’s entirely possible that I started a blog because everyone else had one. They’re even blogging on the Archers, for God’s sake.  There was a huge sense of achievement when I set it up and published my first post. I was looking forward to writing the next one, and did so fairly quickly. The third one, a little less so. By post 4 or 5 it was starting to feel like a bit of a chore.

The fact is, I treat my blog like a handbag. When I buy a new bag, I’m thrilled with it. I stroke it, open and close its compartments, sniff its leather and generally revel in its gorgeousness. Then after a few outings I feel ready for a change and I toss it onto the shelf in my wardrobe that’s stacked two feet deep in bags of various colours and sizes. Not that I have a pile of other discarded blogs lurking in cyber-storage, but you get the picture.

This was never intended to be a daily, diary style blog, but my posts have probably been too sparse for me to retain any sort of following. I tell myself that since I’m not being paid for writing it then there is no obligation whatsoever to do so, and it’s self-defeating to view it as a chore. Enjoy it, or don’t do it at all.  But I will try and remember more often that actually I DO enjoy it.

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by Carrie
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You can no longer sue me for misrepresentation over this blog’s title. I did go to Hollywood. Here is your debrief.

This was my third trip to Los Angeles. My first time was over two decades ago. I stayed with a friend who worked as a writer at Paramount and lived in Santa Monica. Her life seemed incredibly glamorous and decadent, even to a 20-something who lived in central London and ran with the meeja pack. We drank Long Island Iced Tea at Alice’s on Malibu Beach, drove along Ventura Highway with the top down and went to ‘industry’ parties where everyone was darkly tanned and dressed from head to toe in white Norma Kamali (it was the 80’s). My girlfriend was 33 and dating a 25 year old. She was a cougar before Demi Moore had even left high school.

My week there passed in a haze of champagne and marijuana smoke (not smoked by me, I should add: it makes me feel sick). I do remember that I loved Los Angeles. Enough to allow my girlfriend to take me to the UCLA campus to sign up to study screenwriting. The plan was to return to the UK, wind up my life there and get a visa and return about a year later. But life intervened. I became pregnant with my daughter and it never happened.

And now it looks as though it could finally happen. I don’t love Los Angeles any more. It’s changed very little, and still feels like a strangely old-fashioned town. Its residents are still the same blend of the mad, the desperate and the genuinely interesting and talented. But I discovered last week that I do still like it. I like it enough to live there for a while. So that is what I plan to do, and this time I don’t intend to leave it 20 years, or even 20 months.

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by Carrie
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Ok, I am now actually in Hollywood. Actually. Really.

At one point it looked as though I might not make it. When I arrived at the BA check-in desk yesterday I was told I might not be able to fly. My passport is about to expire, and since December’s trouser bomber, Homeland Security have been a little skittish about foreigners arriving in their country.

We have The Home Office; the USA has The Department of Homeland Security. ‘Home Office’ sounds all Alan Bennett and tea and crumpets in front of the fire. Department of Homeland Security conjures a mental image of rottweilers patrolling a barbed wire perimeter fence. And indeed when I got off the plane at LAX the I was immediately sniffed by a huge terrorist-slash-drugs dog. He had a sweet, dopey face and I was tempted to pet him but I didn’t, because these are working dogs. And because the man holding his leash had a large gun.

Yesterday’s Homeland Security Welcome Committee couldn’t have been nicer, but I have fallen foul of them in the past. Once I was held for an hour in a detention pen at Denver airport because in my jet-lagged haze I admitted I couldn’t remember which day I was due to return to the UK. No protesting that I had the printout of my e-ticket in my suitcase or that BA had my flight details in their system would assuage them. I had fluffed my lines and therefore proved myself a would-be Illegal Alien. The fact that I was headed for a ski resort in the Rockies was all part of my cunning disguise.

Different story yesterday. After the nice HS people addressing me as ‘dear’, the sweetest taxi driver drove me to his hotel. He admitted he didn’t know where it was but said that we could “figure it out together”. He had a daughter living in Hammersmith and drove a people carrier with blacked out windows which made me feel a bit Victoria Beckham.

And together we did find the boho-chic boutique  hotel in West Hollywood. Boutique just means not very big. The online blurb says that it’s frequented by A-list types like Jennifer Aniston but I find that hard to believe. For a start she has a perfectly good house of her own up the road. And although my room is large and clean and comfortable it’s at the shabby end of chic.  There’s a decent Italian restaurant, so maybe she had lunch there once when she was in the neighbourhood. Or ran in to ask the very nice post-modern hippy front desk staff to help when she had a puncture.

So I don’t think Jen and I are going to be hanging out this week, but it’s still good to be here.

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by Carrie
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The novelist Thomas Wolfe famously said “You can’t go home again.” Only I just did. From the ages of 9 to 13 I lived in Oslo, and last weekend I went back to the city for the first time since we moved away.

We lived in the hilly northwest suburb of Holmen, in a newbuilt house at the top of a steep cul-de-sac. It was an upside down house with open plan reception space on the upper level and a wraparound balcony looking out onto the Oslo fjord; both groovy and modern concepts in the early 70s. Behind the house was virgin forest, bursting with wild blueberries and populated with elk, which would wander down into our garden and munch on the bark of the silver birch trees. At the bottom of the road a bus stopped every morning and picked up my brothers and me, delivering us about twenty minutes later to Oslo’s only international school. At break time we were served delicious cocoa from an urn, and then hopped out of the classroom window and tobogganed straight down a snowy bank into the playground.

A weekends we would get together with family friends and have huge ski-ing or skating parties, or my father and I would hike up the hill, armed with one thermos of soup and another of whisky-laced coffee, and watch the ski-jumping at Holmenkollen. Christmas brought a round of glamorous embassy parties, prayers with the royal family in the king’s private chapel and presents specially shipped out from Hamleys. Summer weekends were about barbecuing and boating on the fjord, or heading up north to the lakes near Lillehammer where we built a raft from logs and sailed it on the icy water. Do I hear you say “idyllic childhood”? It most certainly was.

Oslo now has a metro system, and Holmen is about 10 minutes along the line that heads west. In London that wouldn’t get you past Notting Hill, but Oslo is such a small city that 10 minutes take you into a snowy wasteland, barely penetrable by car. I’d looked up my old address on Google Maps, but once I got off the train everything was just a blur of white punctuated with wooden houses. It was several degrees colder than in the city and the snow was so deep there was no sense of road,  let alone pavement. And it was utterly silent with the muffled hush that snow brings. All of which was deeply disorientating. I trudged in what I hoped was the right direction, looking for familiar landmarks, but didn’t recognise anything. My hands were so cold, even with gloves, that I was about to turn back and head for the station when I realised I was standing at the foot of the cul-de-sac. Two children with sledges were sliding down it, just as my brothers and I used to. And there it was.

As I walked towards it, I felt a huge lump in my throat and tears pricking in my eyes. Some of the forest has been cleared to make way for apartment blocks, but otherwise it’s exactly the same. Even the name on our neighbours’ mailbox. They had a lovely golden retriever and a hot teenage son who was my first pre-pubescent crush. Only he’ll be a pot-bellied, balding 50 year old now.

The tears were happy tears. I had been happy living in Norway, and to me it was simply…home. But could I live there now? Absolutely not. Three and a half decades stand between me and that version of myself; years filled with marriage, motherhood, divorce, the life of a working single parent, triumphs and disasters in both career and personal life. I am not the same. And that was exactly what Thomas Wolfe meant. I could go back to the house where I lived as a child, but I could never return to the home of my idyllic childhood.

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by Carrie
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Tom Utley’s recent article in the Daily Fail about the tedium and isolation of rural life struck a chord with me. I’m wondering if the enforced snow days we’re enduring this month will change the views of the two and a half million Britons who leave the city every year to pursue their fantasy life in the countryside.  Or of deluded slebs like Billie Piper and Lily Allen  who gabble winningly about the joys of the bucolic life but who will have scarpered back to London sharp-ish when the snow started to settle.

My elderly parents have lived in the same house in a North Cotswold village for 30 years. They currently have so much snow that they can’t even open the back door, let alone walk to the end of the drive. My mother is threatening to kill my father and then top herself if she’s forced to stay inside much longer. While I retain a nostalgic fondness for that same village, I’m strictly a city girl. My recent 10 month stint in a large converted barn near the original ‘Candleford’ (of lark rising fame) was due to issues around my son’s education and not a lifestyle choice. It was a lovely comfortable house to live in, but I couldn’t get out of it and back to London fast enough.

The barn was nearly a mile from the nearest village and that village didn’t have a shop. So when we had heavy snow in February last year we were well and truly cut off. Not least because the local council – Aylesbury Vale DC: consider yourselves named and shamed -  didn’t grit any of the roads between us and civilisation. No, they hadn’t run out of grit: they had a policy of NEVER GRITTING. Rural communities are neglected when it comes to spending money: remember that, all you potential relocators.

Property porn shows like Escape To the Country promote the idea of The Country (as if it’s a place on a map) as a rural theme park, there for recreational purposes. The househunters justify their move on the grounds they’ll be enjoying vast open spaces and lots of long health-giving walks. They’d do well to remember that while urban parks were designed and landscaped as pleasure gardens for people to stroll in and enjoy, The Country is for growing crops and grazing livestock. Try enjoying a relaxing stroll down some rutted single track lane when you have to leap into the ditch every couple of minutes to make way for tractors and trailers, or manic women talking on their mobiles at the wheel of a huge 4×4 as they do their twice-daily 20 mile school run.

The fiction of Jilly Cooper and Rachel Johnson and interviews with faux-posh Liz Hurley promote the idea of rusticity as scorchingly sexy. Believe me; it is not. The only reason anyone would have sex in The Country is because there is absolutely nothing else to do.

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by Carrie
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Confession: I don’t like Christmas.

Actually it’s a lot more complicated than not liking it. I find Christmas difficult.

It hasn’t always been this way. When I was a little girl I spent  364 days of the year feverishly looking forward to the next one (with a day off for my birthday). My memories of childhood Christmases are entirely beatific. Lolling under the tree with my siblings, inhaling its scent and trying to guess the contents of the presents. Listening to an ancient scratchy LP of Boris Ord’s Nine Lessons and Carols on Christmas Eve while my father made the stuffing for the turkey. Catching a glimpse of a tall man in my bedroom very late that night and being too sleepy to be sure if it was Father Christmas or Daddy. Singing part harmonies round the piano to carols played by my beloved grandmother.

Some of my childhood Christmases were spent in Norway, and no-one knows how to do Christmas like the Scandinavians. Everywhere you go there are candles and hot spiced drinks and the most charming decorations I’ve seen anywhere.  More magical yet, when I was a teenager I went to Bethlehem on Christmas Eve and sang carols outside under the stars in the shepherds fields. Yes, the REAL shepherd’s fields, where the Christmas story began.

And then one Christmas Eve about twenty years later my marriage ended and I found myself alone next to the tree with a six year old asleep upstairs, quite unaware of how her life was about to change, and a seven month old baby. I dawdled over his ten o’clock bottle and sat with him  asleep in my arms for a long time, unwilling to go to bed alone.

Christmas as a single parent is hard. Very hard. The responsibility for creating the magic your children will remember forever lies with you alone, and there’s nothing more lonely than sitting up on your own stuffing Christmas stockings. It’s not just single mothers who feel the pressure to please everyone, provide everything, create a Nigella-esque domestic miracle. Christmas can be hard work, period. The build up starts in September, with the appearance of cards and giftwrap in the shops, then the Christmas ads on TV, then people enquiring about your plans and the endless catalogues and emails trying to flog you stuff. And the bigger the build up, the bigger the potential for the day itself to be like a balloon after half the air has leaked out of it . By the time the third week of December rolls round, I’m sick of the C-word and longing for it to be over.  Big Ben has barely struck twelve on the 31st before I’m ripping down the decorations and hauling the tree out to be recycled.

Christmas is about tradition and repetition, so perhaps the best sort is one that delivers a complete surprise. A true Christmas cracker. The year that my husband left me, the children and I were rescued by my sister and had a reassuringly normal Christmas day at her house, absolved from the need to provide food or be too compos mentis. And on Boxing Day my father endured terrible holiday traffic to drive us to Gatwick and put us on a plane to Portugal where we joined my brother and sister in law at her family’s beautiful pousada in the hills of the Alentejo. The weather was mild and unfailingly sunny, the children all played happily and we walked the dogs through herb-scented cork tree groves and drove jet skis far too fast on the lake. On New Year’s Eve there was a big party and everyone got drunk. It turned out to be one of the best Christmases ever.

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by Carrie
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I went skating at Somerset House yesterday.  It was the first time I’d set skate on the ice for over a year and a half. Last winter I was living in rural isolation in Lark’s Vomit with no outdoor rink within easy reach. I was also struggling with a shoulder injury that made exercise of any sort difficult.

I’ve disparaged my stint on Sky Magazine in this blog, but there were a couple of very good things that came out of it. One was singing ‘I Can See Clearly Now’ with Donny Osmond in his suite at the Dorchester. The other was skating with Torville and Dean. Ok, so the occasion was more trackie bottoms and machine coffee than diaphanous indigo chiffon and Bolero, but I did get a mini-tutorial in skating backwards from Chris Dean.

The magazine was doing a spread to promote Dancing On Ice and someone had to go and spend a whole day at the rink with Torvill, Dean and a couple of the sleb skaters. None of the other feature writers wanted to do it, but even if they had I would have trampled over them to get to the front of the queue. I learned to skate on a frozen fjord in Oslo when I was a child, and I’ve loved it ever since. The Almighty made me crap at ball games but competent at anything involving balance.

And yesterday the sun was shining. I was nearest to the barriers when they opened them for the session and first onto the ice. I skated alone into the centre of the rink and did a tentative pivot.  It felt good to be back on the ice. It felt very good.

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by Carrie
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I promised to explain the title of my blog.

I’m one of four siblings. I love them all dearly, but I’m closest to my youngest brother. One of the things that unites us is a mutual passion for film. My brother started a film foundation at university, raising money to finance student productions. He also directed a short film with his some of his mates, which I remember as being mostly pretentious and dire.  After  graduating he worked as a runner for BBC Drama then as 4th AD on ‘Distant Voices, Still Lives’. And together he and I wrote a full length screenplay: a rather overblown period piece based on true historical events. It was seen by a couple of producers but dismissed as too expensive to make.

My brother then went on to work in media finance, founded his own multimedia group and ended up becoming A Very Big Cheese Indeed in the movie world. Amongst othr things, you have him to thank for the Twilight franchise reaching your screens. Meanwhile I wrote and storylined some animated children’s TV and briefly did some editing for a fledgling script clearing house. But I never lost that early passion for movies and lurking on the back page of the agenda somewhere the bottom line item was always ‘Write hit screenplay’.

Earlier this year I applied to the London College of Communications to do their two year screenwriting degree. Applications outnumbered places by a factor of 10 to 1, and although I was shortlisted, they decided not to offer me one of the 24 places. I’ve never failed an exam or to get on a course in my life, apart from my driving test (the gearstick snapped off in my hand) and my History mock A level (I got 9% for a dare: I was 17 and a twat). So I will admit to being temporarily crestfallen. I told myself that it was because my writing samples were too polished and mature. In reality I think I came off as smug in the interview.

My dismay didn’t last long though. I already have two degrees and I’ve never wanted to do a Diana Ross and go for three.  And two years felt potentially too long to commit to learning a skill I’ve already half-acquired. There’s also a cunning back-up plan in formation, which involves going through the same process but faster on the other side of the Atlantic. And in far more congenial surroundings than the Elephant & Castle. The first few months of 2010 have been earmarked for investigating each option in more depth and then making my decision. And that story – along with sundry other garbage – will appear in this very blog.

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by Carrie
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Today is my uncle John’s 85th birthday. 65 years ago he celebrated turning 20. A week later he was dead;  the bomber he was flying shot down over Tripoli just five months before the end of the war.

The photos of him hint at my family’s rumoured gypsy blood: black hair and dark eyes.  Picture a blend of  Clive Owen and Johnny Depp. Tall, with matinee idol looks, he excelled academically and in any sport he took on. At an American high school he would have been both Homecoming King and valedictorian.

My father by contrast was uninterested in sport and failed to cover himself in academic glory. He had unruly wavy hair and bottle-thick specs (Pretty much as I would be without Focus Daily Disposables and Corioliss hair straighteners).  My grandmother made no secret of her preference for her firstborn, the golden boy John. Yet it was John that she lost. When the War Office sent on his medals she threw them angrily into the bin: my father retrieved them later when she wasn’t looking.  From then until her death over 40 years later  she carried a worn sepia photo in her purse. It showed John having his wings pinned onto his chest by his RAF Wing Commander. She rarely spoke of him, finding it too painful, but I do remember her telling me that the minute he signed up she knew with certainty that she would lose him.

The death of such an important family member is like a stone thrown into a still pond. The ripples fan out, reaching down the generations. John’s death was a terrible legacy for my father. Not only because he adored his gifted older brother but because he – the overlooked second son, the also-ran – had to carry the guilt of being sole survivor. I was not untouched either. My grandmother desperately wanted a grandson, another John, but my mother’s first child was a girl. When she was pregnant again, my grandmother wrote her a card telling her that she was knitting a blue bonnet and ‘relying on’ her to produce a boy this time. But that baby was me. Although my mother later went on to have two sons, as I child I could never quite shake off the feeling of having brought disappointment in my wake when I came into the world.

John’s life ended so that feral hoodies could stab and happy-slap each other, so that we would have Pokemon and Playstations and Pudsey. His body was never retrieved. There was no farewell, no funeral, nowhere to go to grieve.  So several years ago when we were on holiday in Normandy I seized the chance to take my two children to the War Memorial in Caen. One of their exhibits is the same plane that John flew. I stood in front of it with tears running down my cheeks, overwhelmed with sadness for the handsome, talented young man who never achieved his full potential. For the aunt and cousins I never had. For a brief life that cast a very long shadow.

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by Carrie
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This has been a prolonged labour.

It must be at least two years since someone first said “You should write a blog”. I turned over the idea like a nice shiny pebble found on a beach but discarded it on the grounds of having nothing to write about.  The received wisdom that it’s not what you write but how you write has only made me procrastinate more.

So labour has rumbled on, through a kaleidoscopic series of dream blogs, numbed by the requirement never to do today what you can out off until tomorrow. Finally there was an expensive intervention in the form of a Wordpress training course. And now that I have completely forgotten everything I learned on the course, it’s time to begin.

One of the reasons I picked the title was to make my life look a lot more glamorous than it really is. And because ‘My Shit Life So Far’ has already been taken by Frankie Boyle. I toyed with ‘A Universe of Cake’ or something Malcolm Tucker-esque like ‘Read the Fucking Blog or Fuck the Fuck Off’. The most interesting (we’re talking relatively, of course) will be revealed in a future post. Stand by your beds, duly gripped.

I’ve earned a living from writing for more than 20 years. I’ve written fiction and been a feature-writing hack on most of the national papers. I’ve even worked for Sky, which is the career equivalent of stabbing your thigh with a blunt bread knife. But I’ve never been so nervous about publication. This is because I’ve written about every subject under the sun but never about myself. Until now. But in the personality-disordered era of social networking and blogging, this is what we do. So here I am: a late adopter I’m giving my newborn blog a gentle shove. Off you go.

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by Carrie
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