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, 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; things fall off them. 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 can't 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.

...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 months of suspending an avocado stone by toothpicks over a jar of water, eventually here's 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 (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'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 mismatch clothes, I lose my fountain pen, I lose my voice (literally, but yes, I get that it's a metaphor), I kill 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 like 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), Michael Gambon's farmer ticking off Jarvis Cocker for "weak songwriting" (and knowing the puppetmakers had to make their own ball-socket joints using Swiss watch bolts  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.

It's also a 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 but he's still a wild animal and his impassioned defence of wildness and why we need it really resonates. There's even an excellent bit with a wolf.

I also loved that the whole film was stop-motion. 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 a 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. The handmadeness of Wes Anderson's film is what makes it so completely charming.