Mundanity.

I haven't had time to post in a while because I have been insanely busy. I haven't been doing anything that important; just lots of mundane little things, which I will now relate to you, because I'm in that kind of mood.

I went to see We Will Rock You for the third time with my parents and aunt. We saw it in Birmingham because it's easier for my aunt to get there. Birmingham has almost become a home-from-home city for me, what with it being so easy to get to from university. It was nice to go back there and reminisce about university times: shopping trips, eating cake in Druckers, haggling with a very insistent man in the market over the sale of eight umbrellas (don't ask). It was nice to see my aunt, whom I haven't seen in years. We're very different: she lives in the country, where she has no car, computer, satellite TV or even a shower, while I'm a suburbs girl a stone's throw from London. So we don't have a lot in common, and I was worried it would be awkward, but it wasn't. She was lovely and she bought me a top with a big shiny gold owl on it I have been coveting for ages. Score. WWRY was good as always.

What else? I went to see a dance show in London with a friend. I also hung out with my friend who's just come back from travelling in Asia, and we chatted for ages. She had some pretty scary experiences, including being bitten by a venomous spider about the size of my head (I am still traumatized from the photos).

We also drew up The Oath. We both want to get fit before we go back to university, so we decided that for three weeks and three days we're going to do exercise every day and only eat healthy food. It's pretty strict: forbidden items include alcohol, chocolate, cakes, biscuits, sweets, crisps, white bread, cheese, coffee, potatoes, pasta, rice and any snacks between meals. If we eat any of these we have to do double the exercise. When I tell people about it I always hear cries of, "What? But you're so skinny!", but it's not about losing weight. It's just about being healthy. When I stuff my face with cake and drink about four cups of tea a day, as I usually do, I always feel tired and sluggish. It's been five days and I'm already feeling more alive.

I did have a nasty run-in with a bar of chocolate at my friend's house on day three, though. It literally shoved itself in my mouth. I don't know how that happened! Anyway, I did the forfeit, so it's fine.

My friend from university came to stay the next day and I showed her the joys of my village. We went to the park and had a picnic on one of the piers overlooking the lake. The weather was beautiful and the geese didn't try to kill us for our food. Then we watched an entire series of Peep Show and two movies. It was a lovely day! On Sunday I had a very successful shopping trip with my mum. We got a load of CDs, including a Rachmaninov CD for me, which made me very happy. Then I got some boots that I am so pleased with. I have been looking for some good quality leather black ankle boots, as well as some brown mid-calf ones with buckles, for ages, and then they both came along at once. They are gorgeous, and they were both bargains! The black ankle boots were £15 down from £100. I am actually in love with the brown boots. They are Kurt Geiger, originally £230, down to £71! It was still a lot of money but considering what good quality they are I am really pleased. Especially since I can never find shoes to fit my ridiculously small feet.

That probably bored the life out of you, didn't it?

Amongst doing all this stuff, I have just realised how much I need to do before returning to university, and it's making me panic a bit. I have a pile of at least fifteen books on my shelf, all of which need to be read at some point in the next three weeks. I just finished Anita and Me by Meera Syal (very good), The Sorrows of Young Werther by Goethe (unremarkable), and have managed to plough most of the way through Flaubert's Madame Bovary. Next up is Scarlet and Black by Stendhal, which looks like the most unexciting read ever. I really don't think I'm going to get through all these books.

On top of that I'm trying to write two stories, and my friends keep phoning me and asking me to do things in the little free time I have left. I know it's terrible, but sometimes I feel almost resentful when people snap up all of my free time. I should be grateful that I have wonderful friends who want to spend time with me, and I love spending time with them, but often all I want to do is turn off my phone and curl up in bed with a book. I get really stressed. It's a weird metaphor, but this is how I feel when there are too many things demanding my time and attention: I feel like the centrepiece of a Sunday roast. I'm sitting there in the middle of the table, trying to mind my own business, but people keep on tearing strips off me until I'm just a pile of bones.

Is that too melancholy?

Ah well, I'm off to Portugal with some friends from university in two weeks. Three girls, three guys and one undoubtedly very messy apartment. Most importantly, a beach and a swimming pool. There will be plenty of time to relax there!

Crime and Punishment.

So I just finished reading Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Wow, that was heavy going.

I know pretty much nothing about Russian literature. I read Tolstoy's Anna Karenin and then I read this, and that's the extent of my reading in that particular area. I have to read War and Peace for one of my modules next year, but I probably won't be conscious after finishing that, one so I thought I'd better write a blog entry now.

I'm not going to even attempt to adopt a scholarly tone for this, so here we go: Crime and Punishment is absolutely mental.

Seriously. Not a single character in the book is sane. Where do I begin? There's the main character, Raskolnikov, who murders an old woman with an axe, the reason given to justify this deed being that he thinks he's some kind of revolutionary Napoleon, from what I gather. He's poor and wanders around in filthy rags and lives in a cupboard which he can't pay the rent for, and this woman is wealthy due to being a greedy old witch, and yet he doesn't kill her for the money. He hides everything he steals from her under a rock. Oh, and when people give him money, which they do quite often, he either gives it to someone else or throws it off a bridge. I wanted to yell at him to keep the money and go buy himself a nice meal, since he never seems to eat anything, leaving me to wonder how he survives to the end of the book. He gets very ill, raves deliriously in his bed, broods a lot, wanders around the slums falling asleep in bushes, abuses all his friends and family, and then finally turns himself in to the police. Then he goes to jail, decides he's in love with a prostitute, and that's the happy ending.

Who else is there? He has this friend, Razumikhin, who's also completely off his rocker. He's basically permanantly excited and follows Raskolnikov around like an overexcited spaniel, despite the fact Raskolnikov tells him to get lost on numerous occasions. Then there's Svidrigailov, this weird old lecher who has a creepy obsession with Raskolnikov's sister and flings money at everyone who comes within ten metres of him, before announcing he's going to America and then shooting himself in the head. Porfiry is the clever detective who knows that Raskolnikov murdered the old woman, but he never tells anyone because he has no concrete evidence. Instead he constantly torments Raskolnikov and makes long rambling speeches in which he says "tee-hee-hee!" a lot. There are lots of other characters, but it would take too long to go through them all, and I can't pronounce let alone remember any of their names.

I'll briefly mention the female characters though, because they don't fare much better. Sonya is the prostitute who 'offers Raskolnikov redemption'. I think this is because she is the only person he feels able to confess the murder to. And she loves him and he loves her and she gives him the New Testament and at the end he considers maybe thinking about reading it. Which is good, I guess. Anyway, Sonya spends most of the book trembling and crying and wailing, "Oh merciful Lord!" which was very sweet at first but just got a bit pathetic after a while. The other woman worth mentioning is Katerina Ivanova, Sonya's stepmother, who is consumptive and runs around going "cahuh-cahuh-cahuh!" a lot, and thinks she is a noblewoman despite living in absolute squalor, and goes raving mad when her permanently drunk husband dies, and then forces her children to wear ridiculous hats and dance in the streets. And then dies. Yeah. I do feel a bit sorry for her, but she is mental like the rest of them.

So you've got all these crazy characters wandering around St. Petersburg trying to have conversations with each other, but failing since none of them is on the same page as any of the others. Most of them spout two-page long monologues in which there is no logical line of thought, and which are usually misunderstood by the other characters. Everything is so...disconnected. I suppose it's the real world seen through a framework of poverty and exggerated ten times over. It's a grotesque, gloomy, clownish fantasy world, full of charicatured figures, where nothing feels real and nothing quite makes sense. It completely threw me out of my prim and proper middle-class English Home Counties comfort zone. No one did what I expected them to do, what I would have done, and it frustrated me a lot. By the end of it, I'd stopped expecting anything to make sense.

But then, there was a suggestion at the end that order might be restored - that Raskolnikov will repent of his crime and lead a happy life with Sonya when he is released from jail. Wikipedia tells me that Dostoyevsky was an Orthodox Christian (though I suspect it's more complicated than Wikipedia suggests), which I suppose makes sense of that.

Anyway, I know I have spoken irreverently about Crime and Punishment and its general craziness. But you know what? I thought it was brilliant. Who says literature has to make sense?

I love Hamlet.

If it were possible to marry an inanimate object, I would probably marry a copy of Hamlet. I love Hamlet to the point that it is almost disturbing.

I am obsessed with it: it is one of the very few things in this world that make me cry every time without fail (the other things being Rachmaninov's 2nd piano concerto and Norrington's death in the third Pirates of the Caribbean movie - I have a devastatingly massive crush on Jack Davenport) and I consider it to be the best thing ever written EVER. I can't explain why I love it so much. There's a huge debate about whether Hamlet is feigning madness or whether he is actually mad, but I think that even in his madness he is the sanest character in any play. The way he responds to his tragic circumstances is so convincing - I think I'd go crazy if my uncle killed my father and then married my mother. All of the other characters (except Horatio) betray or totally misunderstand Hamlet, but as the audience you feel like the only people who see who he really is. Every time I watch it I feel like I go a bit mad with him.

I was obviously delighted when my friend offered me very cheap tickets to see Jude Law play Hamlet in London last night. I'm not such a big fan of Law, but I thought it would be interesting to see him attempt the ultimate role when I'm accustomed to seing him in awful romcoms. I mean, The Holiday is pretty much the Bad Movie I compare all other bad movies to. That one really set the bar. My friends and I watched it last Christmas and we rewinded back to the bit where the little girl looks at Cameron Diaz and goes YOU SMELL LOVELY...I LIKE YOUR LIPS! about five times because at the time it was the funniest thing we'd ever seen. Anyway, I'm off on another tangent. Sorry.

Last year I was also lucky enough to get tickets to see David Tennant in the Royal Shakespeare Company production. We drove up to Stratford-upon-Avon and combined it with a visit to Shakespeare's birthplace. Tennant was so good that I left fancying him a bit, despite his not being particularly attractive and my not being a fan of Doctor Who. I didn't expect Law to better his performance and I was right. So now, like everyone else who has had the good fortune to see both productions, I am going to compare them.

Tennant was far more witty and charismatic. He was excellent at being mad, which isn't surprising considering the quirky, barmy way he played Doctor Who. However, when it came to the soliloquys, the moments when Hamlet is consumed by grief and the desire for revenge, he was surprisingly touching. One minute I was laughing, the next I had to hide the fact my eyes were watering pathetically from the people sitting around me. Law on the other hand went down the angry, brooding, shouty route, which he did pull off well, but at times I felt it lacked any emotional content and he was just speaking lines. He substitued emotion for over-the-top hand gestures, such as pointing to the sky when he said the word 'sky'. Thanks, Jude, I had no idea in which direction the sky was located. At points he was very over the top...but I feel I'm being a bit mean to him. He spoke the lines very well whereas Tennant had a tendency to garble, and he grated on me a lot less in the second half. His portrayal was consistent, he drew laughter from the audience in all the right places, and by the end he had really pulled me into the story.

Hm, what else? My friend and I both agreed that Ophelia in last night's production was unbearable. I just read a review that described her as 'touching'. Ugh. The only thing she touched was my suppressed desire to scream and break things. She was stiff and dull and just reeled off the lines robotically. Her version of madness was wandering around the stage singing in a pretty voice. In the Tennant production Ophelia was running around the stage, shouting, flinging flowers at people, tearing off her clothes. The ghost wasn't, er, ghost-like enough for me last night, and Horatio didn't really do it for me. It's not Hamlet's actual death that always sends me into floods of tears, it's when Horatio says "Now cracks a noble heart. Goodnight, sweet prince, and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest" that I begin to bawl like a five-year-old, because Horatio loves Hamlet and stays loyal to him to the end. But this Horatio didn't particularly seem to care, and I only experienced a bit of mild eye-watering (and for some reason nose running, which was very attractive).

Both productions went for the whole gloomy set, everyone wears dark colours vibe, which is probably the best way to go with Hamlet. In the Tennant production it was chilling and atmospheric, but last night's set was a bit...blah. When Law spoke the "to be or not to be" line he was standing in the snow framed by a set of massive doors. I suppose it was a little hackneyed but I quite liked it. Oh, and the scene of Polonius' death was excellent. Hamlet and Gertrude were behind a sheer curtain and Polonius was on the side of the audience listening. Hamlet then stabbed him through the curtain and he tore it down as he died. He ruined this a bit by falling onto his front and then suddenly flopping over onto his back with a massive thud. It made me laugh but no one else found it funny. It was like one of those moments when someone sneezes in a silent exam hall and you are the only person trying to hold back hysterical laughter.

Oh, and apparently Kevin R. Mcnally played Claudius, and I had absolutely no idea until I got home and looked it up online! I didn't recognise him because the only thing I've seen him in is Pirates of the Caribbean as Gibbs, and so I always picture him covered in muck and swigging a bottle of rum (Pirates is another one of my obsessions if you hadn't guessed).

Overall it was a very good performance and I now have a lot more respect for Jude Law - he did very well, though not as well as David Tennant, who is awesome. Law proved that he can act more than one type of character. I read somewhere that Tennant and co. are going to create a film version of the RSC performance to release on DVD, which I am so buying and watching over and over again (and you should too). I suppose the point of this massive blog post is to say that if you've never seen or read Hamlet, please do so. It will make your life better. It might even make you sob like a baby. Then again, that might just be me.

BASIC GRAMMAR FOR IDIOTS

Okay, so I don't expect much from Fictionpress. It is a site predominantly for angsty pre-teens, and at nineteen years old I am basically a veteran. But here's what baffles and angers me about it: it's supposed to be a site for people who love writing. How can you love writing and yet have no knowledge, let alone respect, for the very basics of the English language? I know grammar at nineteen years old, and I knew it when I was thirteen years old, too. Age is no excuse. I am appalled by the quite frankly embarrassing butchering of English I see on Fictionpress on a daily basis.

Here is a guide to grammar for idiots. I know that the people who read my blog are generally lovely, intelligent people who can spell, and so this is not directed at you. It is more of a generic angry rant.

Emma's guide to basic grammar for idiots

1. "It's" is a contraction. It means IT IS. If you write, "the cat licked it's paw", you are in fact saying, "the cat licked it is paw". THIS MAKES NO SENSE.
2. On a similar note, you can't just shove apostrophes into random plurals. Egg's. Dvd's. Pillow's. Sorry, the pillow's what? These are the only two functions of an apostrophe: to signify a contraction, or to denote possession. Stop using them for other things. Apostrophes are not like sugar, which you can sprinkle randomly all over something to make it nicer.
3. You're = YOU ARE. Your = POSSESSIVE PRONOUN. Learn the difference. It's really not hard. I'm not asking you to memorise the periodic table here.
   
4. Capitalising Every Word In a Sentence Does Not Constitute Formal Writing. It Is In Fact Incredibly Irritating And Makes You Sound Like You Are Talking Like a Robot. Please Stop it Now.
5. You must always capitalise 'I'. I learnt this in Year One. If you are still writing "and then i went to the shops", I think you have a lot of catching up to do and perhaps need to be demoted to aforementioned year. In fact, please remember to start your sentences with capital letters in general.
   
6. You can't just randomly change tenses halfway through a paragraph or sentence. If you don't understand why this is, I wash my hands of you, but let me get the ball rolling by telling you that we do not live in a completely incoherent time-warped world where the present can become the past in an instant. This is one of the basic facts of existence, let alone grammar.
   
7. Why do some people not realise that if you pose a question you must end it with a question mark or else it will sound like you are an unbearable person who talks in a monotone all the time.
8. I don't understand why people seem to hate question marks, and yet they love exclamation marks - so much that they deem it acceptable to either make every sentence an exclamatory one, or to use six all in one go. You cannot write, "And I couldn't believe how handsome he was!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" without sounding like a squealing fangirl at her very first boyband concert.
   
9. Okay, I apologise for the caps lock, and I am aware that this in itself is bad grammar, but I need to use it to express my sheer outrage at this last point. Here goes: YOU CANNOT SPEAK IN INTERNET SLANG IN YOUR WRITING. THIS IS COMPLETELY UNACCEPTABLE. YOU ARE CREATING A PIECE OF ART, NOT CHATTING TO YOUR BEST BUDDY ON MSN. IF YOU THINK CREATIVE WRITING IS SUCH A WASTE OF YOUR TIME THAT YOU FEEL THE NEED TO CONTRACT "YOU", A SIMPLE THREE LETTER WORD, TO "U", THEN YOU SHOULD NOT BE WRITING, AND SHOULD ACTUALLY BE BANNED FROM BEING NEAR A KEYBOARD OR ANY KIND OF WRITING IMPLEMENT EVER AGAIN IN YOUR LIFE. THIS IS THE ULTIMATE DISRESPECT TO THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND I DIE QUITE A LOT INSIDE EVERY TIME I SEE ANYONE DOING IT.
   

Breathe, Emma, breathe...

Yes Girl!

You may have read the book Yes Man by Danny Wallace. If not, you may have seen the Jim Carrey film adaptation, which contains almost nothing that happens in the book and destroys all the humour by Americanising everything (no offence, guys), but nonetheless makes the same basic point. The point is this: Danny Wallace realises his life is going nowhere and so decides he is going to say Yes to every proposition made to him. He gets into lots of bizarre situations and, long story short, concludes that while it is good to open yourself up to more opportunities, there are times when you have to draw the line and say No.

I am a Yes Girl, but not in the good way; rather, in the pathetic way. I always say No to the things that might make a difference - for example, I will never go to a social event where I won't know many people, and so I never meet anyone new. But I say Yes to pretty much everything else, only because I am too timid and polite to say No. I will pay money to see a film I've already seen because my friend wants to see it; I will pretend to like food I hate because everyone else is eating it; I will buy a hideous jacket because the salesperson is so persistent.

I'll give you one recent example of this.

So I'm walking down Oxford Street in London. For any readers who aren't familiar with London, let me say that Oxford Street is busy, particularly on a Saturday in the summer. I'm walking along, when I see a man standing in the middle of the street. This man looks fairly ordinary, except he is scanning the crowds with a scary glint in his eye as if he is looking for someone. As soon as his eyes fall on me, it is apparent that I am THE CHOSEN ONE. I try the old 'head down, eyes on the ground, walk as fast as possible' manoeuvre, but he forms a human blockade in the street and I am forced to stop and listen to him. He shoves something into my hand, which I take, assuming it's a leaflet, and then try to continue my peaceful walk. But the man won't let this happen.

"You speak Russian?" he asks me.

I don't know why, out of everyone on Oxford Street, he decided I was the most Russian-looking person. I also don't know how exactly you can tell a Russian speaker from their general appearance, but apparently they all look like me.

"Er, no," I say.

"Have you heard of Hare Krishna?" he asks.

Oh dear. I look down at the leaflet in my hand and discover it is, in fact, a book. A book about meditation. I make an ineffectual attempt to shove it back into his hands and do a runner, but he looks so excited about the fact I have actually stopped to listen to him that I don't have the heart.

"Er, yes," I say.

He starts going on about meditation and yoga and how I should come down to this hall somewhere and take part in some class on something or other, and I smile and nod and try to conceal the sheer panic in my eyes. I keep repeating the word "cool" over and over again for lack of anything else to say. Passers-by eye me with sympathy, but their eyes seem to say "you got yourself into this one!" and none of them tries to rescue me by pretending to mug me or kidnap me or something.

Eventually he finishes his speech. "I give you this book," he says. "But it is not free. We ask for a small donation...eighty pence? One, two pounds?"

And I give him the money. That is how pathetic I am. I am so pathetic and incapable of saying No that I bought a book on spiritual meditation off a Hare Krishna in the middle of Oxford Street, despite a) having no money and b) being a Christian. That is probably the silliest thing about this whole affair. I bought a book about something that conflicts with my own beliefs, and then threw it away as soon as I got home.

I need to stop being a Yes Girl. Once, I went on a date with this guy I was not attracted to in any way whatsoever because I felt bad for him and couldn't say No. The date went okay, until he told me that he thought Eragon was an amazing book and Christopher Paolini was a really talented author. That was the death knell, really. The next time I saw him I pretended I didn't know who he was, and I never saw him again. I am not joking.

Anyone have any tips about how I can be less pathetic? Thanks.

Musings on a wedding.

Yesterday I attended the wedding of a girl who was in my year at school. The ceremony was beautiful, but I also found it very strange. I remember when she first met this boy, in our local nightclub, which is basically a glorified sweaty shoebox with a sticky floor and a terrible DJ. Now they're going to spend the rest of their lives together. It restores my faith in nightclubs a little. Ninety-nine out of a hundred times, the guy who catches your eye across the dancefloor probably just wants to shove his tongue down your throat - but he might just turn out to be the love of your life.

A lot of my friends were shocked when they heard she was engaged at nineteen. "Trust me," I told them, "if you saw them together you'd know it was right." Normally I would say that marrying at such a young age is a mistake, but they make a perfect couple and I know they are going to be happy together.

Personally, I can't even comprehend getting married now. I'm not sure I can comprehend getting married ever, though I hope it will happen one day. Maybe that's just because I haven't been in love. There's just something about the thought of getting into the dress, walking slowly down the aisle with everyone staring at me, speaking the vows into the silence, that absolutely terrifies me. "If it were me I'd do a runner!" I exclaimed (just as the church went silent, because that's the sort of thing that always happens to me). My friend couldn't imagine not spending the rest of her life with the boy she loved. That's the difference between me and her; that's why she is married and I can't even get into a relationship because I'm such a commitmentophobe.

As someone who cannot write a single story without romance in it, you'd think I was a hopeless romantic. And I am. But the romance I write about is all about the pursuit: that exciting period when you first meet someone, when you start to develop feelings for them but you have no idea how it's going to turn out, when one minute you hate them and the next you miss them, when everything goes by in a big confusing dramatic blur. Then you finally end up together - and then the story ends. I don't want to know what happens after that, because that's the part that scares me. What happens when the excitement dies down? What if everything just becomes...mundane?

The pastor at the wedding read a quote from Captain Corelli's Mandolin. Searching for it just now, the first page that came up on Google was a page that contained all of the exact readings he did. How funny. I can imagine him sitting down panic-stricken half an hour before the wedding and typing, "WEDDING READINGS PLZ!!!" into the search box. Anyway, I digress. This quote, which is apparently quite an overdone wedding quote, describes love as "what is left over when being in love has burned away". I know that this is the truth for many married couples who are still in love after many years, but it is a calm and steady love rather than an exciting and passionate one. I hope everyone manages to find this.

As for me? I'm just too much of a free spirit...

The adventures of Rolo, Jack and Max.

Yesterday I decided to clear out my wardrobe so that I could accommodate the various junk I accumulated whilst at uni. At the back of the very top shelf I discovered a folder of short stories I wrote when I was little. It's nice to unearth a piece of nostalgia like that, but at the same time they make me cringe.

I used to have these three toy dogs called Rolo, Jack and Max. Every now and then I would brave the three hours it took to load up our fridge-sized grey beast of a computer so that I could happily type up stories about their various canine adventures on MS Word '97. Some of the stories are quite short, but I'm not going to recite any of them to you. Instead, here are some of my favourite literary gems, complete with butchered grammar:

"Yikes" shouted Max. " I hate spiders, unless they are grilled with cinnamon and garlic... Yum, yum ! ". (Presumably that was a combination of flavours I considered normal...)

"What's going on around here?" the puppies asked Calico, who was promptly sick all over them.

"Ho ! Ho! didn't you know? I do birthdays as well", chuckled Father Christmas.

Rolo suddenly rushed in,followed by a fat ghost smoking a pipe."Hi doods" said the ghost ."Would you like to hear a joke".He diddent wait for a repley."What do cats use to fight?" "catapolts!"."Shut up ghost your annoying me"said Jack.

I don't know where I got the subject matter for these stories. One is about a tortoise called Christopher Columbus that wears its shell upside down so that people mistake it for a bowl. Another is about a giant dog biscuit that chases the puppies around at night. In another they get detention with Mr. Dread, who proceeds to shout "LET'S PLAY BALL!" and lob a baseball at them. This last one is called "Detention is BRILLIANT!!!!!"

My mum has decided that these stories are proof that I am destined to be a writer. She thinks I should rewrite the stories and get them illustrated. "Seriously, I think you have a future in writing children's books," she says. "Children would love to read about Rolo, Jack and Max."

I know I'm lucky that I have a parent who supports my desire to follow a career that will probably see me living in a box on the street offering to write witty verbal vignettes of passers by for small change. At the same time, it can be a bit overbearing, because she expects me to write a bestseller and I don't know whether I can achieve that. Despite having praise lavished on me by my English teacher at school I have never actually won a competition, had anything published, or generally done anything to prove I have talent. I was rejected for the highly in-demand creative writing module at university and instead ended up with my last choice, feminist literature (joy). And yet she still thinks I'm a genius.

So it's dinner-time and my mum is telling my dad about our discovery. They start to discuss this new plan for my life as a children's writer in detail, while I sit and wonder why they don't plan my wedding and funeral too while they're at it.

"Of course, you're going to have to change the name Rolo," Mum says. "Copyright issues and all. Jack, Max, and...Rollo?"

"Why not introduce some diversity?" says Dad. "Jack, Max and Iqbal!"

"She can't do that! They're brothers. That would suggest they have a mother who is promiscuous."

"It would suggest they have a mother who enjoys celebrating diversity!"

I feel like burying my face in my chicken. The joys of witty dinner-time banter.