On packing

I also blame the second-generation thing for my inability to travel light. If I could carry all my things on my back like a snail then I would. Then again, I've got nothing on my mother's family who, on leaving Baghdad with only one day to pack up their lives, and an allowance of only 20 kilos each, packed not one but two rolling pins! Admittedly, they are excellent rolling pins.

Coats and bags and shoes

"I'm never living with refugees again!" said a long-ago flatmate, when our coat rack fell off the wall. I took issue with "refugees" (I'm second generation) and with the implied prejudice, and then I asked him what it had to do with the coat rack, which frankly I blamed him for, as he had put it up in the first place (not that I'm knocking Men Who Do DIY), and he exploded. "Look at all these coats and bags and shoes! You're always getting coats and bags and shoes so you can walk across Russia. And now their weight has pulled the coat rack off the wall!" I took issue with the quantity but when we divided our stuff into two piles, his was a hummock and mine was Everest. I took issue with Russia, and with walking; my family never walked across Russia, they got planes from Baghdad. I took issue with the weight; my walls are stud walls, one up from stage flats. Eventually I ran out of things to take issue with. I still don't have anywhere to put my coats. There's a couple of other things I could track back to the (second-generation) refugee thing: I have a lot of clutter (I like feeling weighed down by things, hard to dislodge), and I am terrible at travelling. I get super-anxious before going anywhere. I'm going to India this week and amid all my listmaking and faffing about, I checked my horoscope which says the Sun is moving to accent the ways I can broaden my horizons. I'm assuming the planet not the paper. And I get that it's vaguely positive but I'm not so neurotic that I need an entire planet to move so I can go on holiday. Maybe I should stop reading horoscopes.

...and eventually you get an avocado

I haven't grown an avocado plant since I was at school. But over the summer I got a sudden urge. It took a lot longer than the California Avocado Commission said. Probably because I don't live in California. But look! After ages of having an avocado stone suspended over a jar of water by toothpicks and nothing happening, eventually you get an actual, you know, plant. And it got me thinking about making. There's always a bit, when I'm writing, where I'm also doing lots of making. Not that I want to jinx it but over the past few weeks I've been baking bread, I ran up some curtains (see how casually I said that...actually the "running up" of curtains proves to be incredibly stressful if you can't do mental arithmetic or sew in a straight line...I blame the latter on my seizures but the former is just me being rubbish), I've nearly finished the cardigan I've been knitting since the beginning of time, and just look at my avocado plant. But I know I'll get to the other bit where I stare at a blank screen, nothing's happening, the words are dead on the page, the characters won't talk to me, and I hate them anyway, and I can't make anything. I overcook pasta, I wear my worst most mismatched clothes, I lose my fountain pen, I lose my voice (literally, but yes, I get that it's a metaphor), I kill my plants, I burn soup. And eventually something shifts and suddenly I'm doing it again; I'm making. The arid bit is vile, the making bit's a thrill, and the getting from one to the other is mysterious, except that I think determination has a lot to do with it, or stubbornness, or rage. You keep going, you throw things at the wall if you have to, and eventually you get an avocado.

Fantastic foxes in the uncanny valley

I don't know what I liked most about The Fantastic Mr Fox; Mr Fox's wardrobe (for day, a pumpkin corduroy suit, two wheat stalks sticking debonairly out of the pockets, for night, red and yellow striped and piped pajamas), the bit where Michael Gambon's mean farmer tells Jarvis Cocker off for "weak songwriting" (and knowing that the puppetmakers had to make their own ball-socket joints using Swiss watch bolts in order to replicate Cocker's awkward, jerky grace), the lovely screenwriting gag where after one of the baddies confesses on his deathbed, Mr Fox's son says "he redeemed himself", or finding out that in order to knit the jumper worn by said baddie, the puppetmakers had to first whittle really tiny knitting needles.

The film's also a real paean to what a rewilding campaigner I know calls the crunchy side of nature. Mr Fox starts out stealing birds and becomes suburban and domesticated (he's a journalist!) but he's still a wild animal and his impassioned defence of wildness and why we need it really resonated, as well as being a quirky take on the Hollywood mantra of being true to one's nature. There's even an excellent bit with a wolf...but I don't want to ruin it.

I also loved that the whole film was stop-motion and watching it I realised how much I hate CGI. The more you can see the joins, the more you're aware that these are handmade puppets being photographed, moved a tiny bit, then photographed again, the more real it seems. I think we believe more when we have to work a bit harder to suspend disbelief. When I wrote Martin's Wedding, a play for puppet and three actors, I found that because I had to work so hard to believe in Martin (the puppet), I cared about him much more than I would have cared about an actor in the same role. After each show, the puppeteers put Martin in his storage box, and the click as it shut was heartbreaking. I found out recently about the uncanny valley, Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori's theory that we don't like robots that look almost human. We like things to look a bit human but at a certain point, confronted with a robot who looks really really human but not entirely so, we'll spot the slight, almost imperceptible wrongness and at this point the robot fall into the uncanny valley; we are horrified by this thing that seemed human and real but is not, we feel alienated and repulsed. Possibly the handmadeness of Wes Anderson's film is what makes it so completely charming.

You know it's properly autumn when

the dark seeps in at five o'clock, and the owls are really going for it. I love the fact that ornithologists now think to whit to whoo isn't one owl's call but two owls calling to each other. A love call in fact. One says to whit and the other replies. To whoo...

I got shot (with a prop gun)

during rehearsals for my play in Leeds. Barthes would be so pleased.

Sophie Calle at the Whitechapel

Sophie Calle’s work usually makes me want to wear my heart on my sleeve and throw myself into the arms of destiny (destiny usually meaning Unsuitable Men) like she does. So, in one of her pieces at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, Calle follows directions from her clairvoyant Maud (excellent name for a clairvoyant) to a seaside war memorial seeking twin brothers who like “boating and challenges”. When the war memorial has no names on it looks like Maud has led her to a dead end. But then, like a miracle, a text message arrives from twin brothers who have sailed the Channel. Maud is thrilled: “It looks like the cosmos has accepted this game with you.”

In Take Care of Yourself she invites 107 women, from a police inspector to a schoolgirl, to respond to a casuistic breakup email she got from her ex. The starkest comes from a rifle shooter who printed out the email and shot it three times, piercing the word “love”. Calle shines light through the bullet holes; it’s beautiful, savage and cathartic. But also terrifying, cynical and hard. One of Calle’s correspondents is appalled by all the bitchiness: “Beware all these women. Most of them want to transform into men, they dedicate their lives to it, it drives them crazy being women, they can’t consent to it. They won’t help you to become a…real woman.”

I've been wrestling with this. It does feel strangely unfeminist to be thin-skinned and open to love and destiny; I feel like I should be deciding my own fate, maybe even facing the world down the barrel of a gun. But really I want to do both. I've been wondering if we feminists (men too!) have a next big challenge: to translate the changes we've made in the world outside (getting the vote, smashing the glass ceiling, all that) to our relationships. Maybe we've decided what we want intellectually, but our hearts are struggling to follow. What I loved about Calle's show was that she risked her heart, then when it didn't work she braved the pain of it, and finally she turned it into art. If I could do all that, I think I'd be a good feminist and a real woman too.