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.

The Last Wolf in Scotland...in Leeds

I’m up in Leeds for a student production of my play, The Last Wolf in Scotland. It’s amazing (and surreal) to come up and find thirty people working on the play, all in T-shirts with the name of the play on, grappling with the plays various challenges—knitting, mending fences, gralloching stags, having wild sex on the Caledonian Sleeper—a lot of business. Then Hungry Like The Wolf starts blaring out, and the cast, mostly 18-year-olds and surely new to Duran Duran, are rocking out on the stage, clambering over the steeldeck that represents the Highlands, and this is what I write plays for, to see that energy and passion brought to a story I came up with on my own in my room.

Oh and we’ve made BBC Scotland.

En garde!

I fenced at school, and although I wasn't very good, I did get to three star (five is Olympic!), I know my derobements from my trompements and I still keep my foil in my wardrobe, wedged behind my Bat Mitzvah dress (ruched fuchsia...it was the Eighties.)

Today I got it out. I've been writing a scene in 1891 and wanting my heroine to do something interesting and suddenly realised that if she fenced, she might look as fabulous as this Edwardian lady fencer, so there I was, lunging, in my bedroom, into nothing.

I'd forgotten how fleet it feels. Foils aren't butch like sabres (the French call the foil le fleuret, the flower bud) so you don't get to feel like Zorro. But when you lunge, your legs feel epic. Just doing it again after so many years brought back the thrill of the chase, the rush of fear, the exhilaration of the hit and the arguably greater satisfaction of the brilliant parry. Now if I could only get my hair to look like that, I'd be happy.

Not bagels, not beigels

but ka'akat; Iraqi bread. Not at all like bagels, in fact, as you don’t malt or boil them, and we don't call them circles but bracelets. They’ve got fenugreek in, and mastic, fennel seeds and mahleb which comes from sour cherries. I never used to cook Iraqi food. It's pretty labour-intensive, designed to be made by extended families of women and girls—when I was about three I remember sitting under my grandma's kitchen table, pulling the stalks off parsley for tabbouleh. When I make Iraqi food now it's like plugging in. Instant nostalgia, an instant feeling of home. But my ka'akat just wouldn't rise. Where my mother said an hour, mine took three. And then I worked it out: her flat is much hotter than mine. Her flat is, I suspect, as hot as Baghdad. Mine is, I think, normal but she always keeps her coat on when she comes over. So. Now I put the dough in the airing cupboard, shut the windows, turn the heating up and put a duvet round the bowl, and, bingo.