Slimbridge

Slimbridge is one of my favourite places to visit. They have lots of different makes of birds and wildlife and stuff. We went there today and of course I took some photos.

It’s a pity that the camera decided to focus perfectly on the bit behind the butterfly, but I’m still happy with this one.

England in summer. Can’t beat it.

Loving Love Letter

A trip away wouldn’t be a trip away without a silly game or two to play. So I got hold of a copy of Love Letter. The game is beautifully presented in a red carrying pouch, which is just as well as you only get 16 cards for your money. But the game is still super.

Each player takes the role of a potential suitor finding confidantes who will deliver their messages of love to a beautiful princess. During a round you have to find the best person to deliver your message of undying devotion. But you can also knock out other players and swap cards with each other in a way which is great fun. Even if, as for me, most of your cunning moves misfire in a spectacular fashion.

Number one son observes that at the end of the day it is really only about chance and at some points you are really only choosing from one of a number of possible options which all have a similar probability of success. He’s right, but the setting and the way you can knobble people if you get lucky carry the game along to the right side of fun for me. Well worth a look I reckon.

Pacific Rim. Go see.

First things first. Pacific Rim is complete rubbish. But it is so complete that it is actually quite wonderful. If you are prepared to make the mental effort to suspend your disbelief somewhere really high (or just leave the critical part of your brain at the door) then you will really, really enjoy it.

If you are able to take on-board “facts” like it requires two melded human brains to control a giant toy robot and that the best way to select pilots for said robots is to to have them try to hit each other with wooden sticks then you will do just fine.

The thing that did it for me was the level of detail and little cultural references that made the daftest parts make sense at the time. The acting is well up to par and everyone gets on with the job in hand with enormous gusto. The computer graphics guys had taken the sensible precaution of making sure that most of the action is either at night, in the rain, underwater or all three at once, so that everything looks properly believable and any necessary bending of the laws of physics is nicely hidden.

If you only go and see one big, daft, movie this summer then it has got to be this one.

I liked it so much I bought the book. Which is very good too.

Writing with Colour at the Guardian Masterclass

Anyone can write, just like anyone can cook. As soon as you move from restaurants and ready meals to getting ingredients and mixing them in pans you can start thinking about getting a white uniform and people shouting “Yes chef!” to you across steam filled kitchens. Moving beyond shopping lists and one line Facebook updates means that you can start pondering putting “writer” on your business card and extracting killer quotes from unresponsive interviewees. Or then again, perhaps not, because of course the really important thing is what everyone else calls you.

If you are the only person that thinks you are the next Jamie Oliver then you might have a hard time getting folks to eat your food.  And while the internet does provide a potential audience of billions, getting them all to come and read your web site will take more than just your idea of deathless prose. This means that you have to do the hard stuff, like practice and learning how to get better.

I’ve never dared call myself a writer; I’m more someone who throws a bunch of words at a blog post every day to see which ones stick. But today I went along to a Guardian Master class called “Writing with Colour” to find out a bit more about this writing business. There was actually another reason for going as well, the sessions were being given by writers who I’d long admired from afar, and I liked the idea of admiring them from a bit closer up.

There were about 80 or so of us on the course, which took place in the actual Guardian newspaper building in London. The sessions were all great. If you have a low opinion of journalists and editors then you should go along, just to find out how thoughtful and considered these folks are about what they do.  I’m pretty sure that not all writers are like this, but these were folks who I’d be happy to listen to all day, which is just as well, because that is what we did.

A few of my thoughts from the sessions:

Read what you have written. Out loud. All the writers took evident pleasure in reading what they had put on the page. This is as confidence thing I reckon and darned good advice. Sometimes you might like what you hear. If you don’t like it, go back and change it until you do.

Be loyal to your work. This can mean a bit of internal wrangling as you seek permission to print that quote from a reluctant interviewee. It might mean you can’t be a totally nice person all the time. And it might mean dropping that wonderful sequence because it doesn’t add anything to the piece.

Always deliver what you were asked for. Someone asked Lucy Mangan what she did if her four o’clock deadline came along and she hadn’t thought of anything to write about.  Her reply was brilliant. That. Does. Not. Happen.  If you are a proper writer and you are asked to write something that’s what you do. You can wrestle with your inner demons about the content (and you should) after you have pressed the send button, but the important thing is if you are asked for 550 words you should deliver 550, along with a convincing pitch for why you should be allowed another 200 or so.

Always edit, and always cut. The editor is the person who makes things better and tighter, sometimes by cutting out what the writer thought of as the best bits. If we end up losing the traditions of print journalism I reckon the editor is the person we will miss the most. This probably means that writers will have to spend more time editing their own work. So try to do this.

Work at what you write. I was very pleased to find that nobody said that they found writing easy. Everyone said they had to work at it. Interviews take preparation and persistence in writing everything down. Features take research and rewriting.  And the work doesn’t stop when the piece is finished, everyone valued re-visiting items and look at why they wrote what they wrote.

Seek out the colour. Work to find that killer fact, or interesting angle, which will give you a hook to hang your words on or will be quoted in the pub by your readers. If you are very lucky the colour will find you, but mostly you find it in the research you did, or the huge pile of notes that you made.

Last week I sent a jaunty tweet to the organisers saying how I was bringing along some crayons, as the subject was “Writing with colour”. I can imagine the sinking feeling in the stomach of the recipient, along the lines of “We’ve got a right one here….” Sorry about that.

Anyhoo, I found the whole affair really stimulating, and if you want to get tips about improving your writing style, and maybe meet a few heroes, then it is well worth the price of admission. And the lunch was good too.

Satnav Humour

Our car SatNav has a mode where it will give directions over another audio signal, automatically turning down the music/radio or whatever when it wants to tell you want to do. Today we were using it while listening to some comedy on the radio, which worked really well. It was great to hear the machine say “At the roundabout, take the first exit” and then get a huge laugh and a round of applause from the audience.