Lunch for the [deputy] landlord...

Baked beans, cottage style.

Two pork ribs, trimmed off a bit to make supper tomorrow, and a piece of smoked bacon, chopped - browned over the fire for 5 minutes or so.

Added a chopped onion, garlic, then a few minutes later, a tablespoon of brown sugar.

Opened tin of tomatoes - and sod it, the new 99p tin opener doesn't work. Curse Robert Dyas then open tin with brute force.

Add 'tin opener' to the shopping list chalked onto the mantel piece.

Added tomatoes to pan. Wiped the fine spray of tomato juice from my face. I probably look like Paul Bettany in Gangster No. 1. The tin died hard...

Added black pepper, bay leaf, majoram - no salt, salt hardens beans.

Added bowl of white beans soaked overnight and water from kettle.

Brought to boil for 10 minutes.

Now, if I had a hay-box, i'd have slid it in there and left it for 4 hours. I don't, so the pot went into the lpg stove in the back-kitchen.

Mmm - lovely smells. Time for breakfast, and a 2 hour stint at the keyboard

Only two hours work today - i'll have to do better tomorrow. Most of the day was taken up with learning to drive a landrover, then carrying stuff up to the cottage in it - an old windsor chair, a zinc chest to store food in, etc.

Home made baked beans taste remarkably like heinz, oddly enough.

Picked a pocket full of blackberries on the way home - i'm eating them with greek yogurt.

Called home to Hereford - it's still summer down there as far as the fruit is concerned.

Reading: Five Red Herrings by Dorothy L Sayers. Silly book. Nothing like as strange, funny and moving as The Nine Tailors. Just a lot of unlikable suspects and some train timetables. And almost NO Bunter...

I wonder if I should learn learn to fly-fish. There's salmon in that river..

Bah - turns out I can post to this blog from the cottage, but not moderate or comment - so that will just have to hang on until I have babysitting duties at the bottom of the hill and can use a real computer.

Meanwhile, either:
A - it's a mild night.
B - i'm toughening up.
C - the place is finally warming through.
D - any combination of the above.

I know this to be the case as I just found myself with no clothes on while getting ready for bed. Didn't manage that when I was here in july!

The pop-pop-snap-hiss of a log fire is one of the loveliest sounds in the world. Seriously.

Just clocking off - 4 hours work on step-outline, trying to make sense of the different stories that make up the whole.

Nice egg and a pot of tea, then a few chapters of Bleak House, which i've had on the go since I got stuck overnight at JFK overnight in June.

Landlord climbing up for lunch tomorrow, so I am soaking beans.

Have to remember to borrow the sewing machine on Saturday and finish putting curtains up before I freeze.

I've cracked under the strain of living wild.

I just caught myself collecting sheeps' wool from the gate to leave out for my mice, so they won't be tempted to carry off my socks. Commit me, now.

I will be living for the next few weeks in a cottage on the edge of England – much further north and I'd be in Scotland. It has the potential to be bleak, but it's actually quite a gentle landscape in the eyes of someone brought up within sight of the Brecon Beacons and the Black Mountains. Drier too.

The northiness does have quite an impact on the seasons; in Herefordshire summer is only just over – here it feels like deep Autumn. The skies are blue, but there is frost on the breeze, and the grass is dying back rapidly on the hillside.

So far, so picturesque – what I should also mention is that the cottage is over a mile from the road (a brisk climb through oak wood land), has no electricity (wood stove, oil lamp, solar radio (Radio 4 and 3), extended life battery for this laptop, and no running water, (trips to the spring at the back.)

It's not as isolated or hard as it first sounds – I have family at the bottom of the hill, who are being very tolerant in regard of hot showers, laundry and TV. I am updating the blog via the mobile phone (but can't comment on any entries until I hit the wonders of broadband at the weekend.

In fact it's rather blissful; my breakfast is cooking on an iron bakestone (a little bit of the Welsh Borders that I brought up here with me), the coffee is popping over a pot-warmer, and I am planning a day's writing, the third full day since I started my short sabbatical from the world of paid employment to complete the script.

I'm using the opportunity to visit various parts of the family while working – in October Orford in Suffolk, in November back to Wales and Hereford, with research and movie time in London (in time for the festival.)

When I can, I'll post some pictures of the cottage and my desk.

Running a live test

I am updating this by email from the North Cloister of Westminster Abbey (a delightful spot with a healthy draft and a fairtrade coffee offering to mitigate the chill of the stone seating.

It's good to know that the Abbey still resembles nothing so much as a national auction house, the bays are crammed hugger-mugger with beds, chairs, stacked portraits, chipped busts and broken vases, all in magically odd conjuction with each other. There is the same tender shock at recognising long dead affection in the portrait of a child, or a faded postcard from the front, lost in the back of a drawer. Poet's corner is, of course, the book section…

Happy (Ethiopian) New Year everyone!

Wednesday was the first day of the 3rd Millenium in the Ethiopian
calendar (which is based on the Coptic Church calendar).

I spent Tuesday evening in Trafalgar Square, with what looked like at
least 3000 Ethiopians and their friends, partying "like it's 1999" for
the very last time.

September is a great time to start the year. It's still warm enough to
sit out, barbecue and drink wine (or Tej) at midnight.

Words from a Recovering Perfectionist

One of the most toxic proverbs which blight attempts to become better at something (whistling, skimming stones, speaking French, ironing shirts, writing films) is “If a thing is worth doing, it's worth doing well”.

Not because it is intrinsically wrong, but because it casts an unspoken shadow over an endeavour every time it is conjured. “If a thing isn't done well it is worthless [and so are you].”
I come from a perfectionist background, where if you don't excel within the first few attempts at something, the attempt to learn is abandoned for fear that you will come second, or look ridiculous. The idea of doing something badly because you are learning how to do it well – or even, just for fun – is unknown.

I (re)started writing 7 years ago, during a long summer of semi-employment. I walked into my first screenwriting class in the second week of September that year. And I scored some easy hits – so far, so good. In keeping with tradition I expected instant results, which of course, did not come. I had to learn a great deal first, not least of which was patience with my own ability to write crap.

This patience was a revelation to me – the fact that I continues to enjoy turning up every morning to the keyboard even when the results were shitty, and adulation and/or cash slow in coming, because I was still learning, was liberating.

After the initial excitement from my old partners in perfectionist crime I started to pick up on real disapproval from some of the fellow perfectionists “Oh for Chrissakes – it's been three years! Just how long does it take to write a screenplay then!”, and “Yes, that's all very well, but how do you intend to make money from all of this”.

This comes from individuals who I see crippled by their own perfectionism. They don't do things at which they do not excel, at which they will come second or third, or which might make people laugh. They don't speak foreign languages aloud, they don't play the piano, they don't ride bikes – and I don't do those things either... [yet!]

The point is – you will never come first, if you don't come second or third or 10th while you are learning, and you will never have the patience to come 10th, third, second or first if you don't enjoy the process of learning, and laugh with your own failures.

So my motto now is “If a thing's worth doing, it's worth doing.”

Caffeinated author.

I am one of those writers who is most productive in coffee shops. Some people are. Some require calm rooms with clear desks and a window with a view; Virginia Woolf's "Room of one's own". Some seem to need to hustle and bustle of a public table, and coffee on tap.

In my experience the coffee shop writers get the studious types. Some of us even feel second-rate because we don't have the desk and the space for calm private reflection. I realise that this works for many many writers.

But the desk writers don't get us. I have been hectored and lectured by mentors who find the habit of writing over a latte and the chatter of other customers degenerate and disordered. How much more you could achieve if you were disciplined, they argue. How deranged must your mind be to think that goofing off in Caffe Nero for 3 hours is real work.

The fact that I can produce 2000 words in that 3 hours (and usually do) is disregarded. I'm not being serious, clearly.

I felt much the same for many years. It was perverse to produce lecture notes while working behind a west end bar, my espresso habit was a sticking plaster until I could settle to real work at home, like a grown up.

Well, after 5 years - stuff that! This is as valid a way to write as any other. The work I produce is its own testament. This is not a perversion but a civilised and social way to use my city as a huge office. And the coffee is great, too.

(Written in the West End Kitchen, Panton Street over a mushroom omelette and a flat white.)