humour 30 August 2009
Fay Weldon is in a bit of trouble for saying it’s usually handier and quicker to just pick up The Husband’s socks, etc, off the floor than spend ages browbeating him into it – I can see where she is coming from and can I say that I do it myself a lot of the time. I don’t think it means she has betrayed feminism – it’s just sharing a bit of truth from her life and shedding a bit on the way some of the rest of us live too. Every so often (actually quite regularly, now I come to mention it) I take Richard to task on the issue and then there’s an improvement for a while before inevitable slippage and we return to me picking stuff up and so the cycle goes on. She talked about this in her My Week item in the Times today but I thought more interesting, for me, were her thoughts on people being annoyed that she smiles so much. I have this problem also – and can be thought of as scatty as a result – I just would prefer to be happy than sad but each comes along with regularity and I deal with them accordingly and I don’t think anyone wants to be bombarded with miserable photos of me or anyone else too often. She thinks the fact that her books have jokes in leads some types to dismiss them as not quite literature as a direct result. Again I can relate to that in as much as when you make people laugh in a novel (although you may also move them to tears elsewhere) it is somehow perceived as frivolous by certain sections of self-confessed Intelligentsia. Their loss, I say. Life is a mixture of all of these elements and we need laughter as much as we experience sadness. You can’t have one without the other, as the song has it. And I know that I would far prefer a book that delivers me both rather than a serious or poefaced presentation of a story. To end her item Fay Weldon said the problem with literary prizes is that the most boring book so often wins – bet there’ll be a bruhaha about that too…
Lovely to take part in the Book Festival at Edinburgh today. Earlier we had a reading for Amnesty International of Tibetan writers and then I did a event with Paul Torday, who is a wonderful writer (and a man who didn’t start any of that till he was 60, so let that be an inspiration to all). Great to see Joyce Watson there who is a regular visitor on this site. She has recommended a sleeping aid and I will try it and let you know how it measures up.
Also why can’t London and Dublin have as many consistently good and funky restaurants as Edinburgh?
