Pork

I saw "Juno" last week and it was pretty good, if a little annoying. It's impossible not to like a movie where the main character uses the term "pork sword".

Canada

I was reading an article a while ago about Canada, and how various provinces threaten to secede, and the writer was speculating that Canada might one day just disintegrate. This idea was characterised as 'the boring-dinner-party theory' of the Canadian constitution. The analogy here (if I really must tease it out for you) is quite lovely. You know those dinner parties where once the first person leaves, everyone else decides that it's ok to leave too. So the thing goes fairly abruptly from being a full table to just being the host couple.

Tip

Get a watermelon. Put it in the fridge. Get it out, cut it up as usual. Then get a lime, or, better yet, a couple of limes. Cut them. Squeeze the lime juice over the cold watermelon slices. Eat them, upside down if you can (I mean the slices upsidedown, not you. Get a grip). You'll thank me for this.

Australia Day

I've never met anyone else who shares this opinion, and people I try to explain it to invariably think I'm a nutter. But here it is anyway.

January 26th is Australia Day, it's a national holiday where we celebrate Australianness in all its richness and whatnot; it also neatly marks the end of the summer holidays and we know that afterwards the kids all go back to school, business picks up again and things get back to normal. So far so good. I do think it's good to have a national day like this.

But why January 26th? The anniversary of the founding of the commonwealth of australia? No. The anniversary of our declaring our independence from Britain? No! The invention of vegemite? The founding of the Carlton football club? No. The official website's a bit shy about this but if you dig a bit you find that it's the anniversary of the landing at Sydney Cove of the First Fleet. So it really has not much at all to do with the founding of Australia as a country - it's an important date it its own right, but it's to do with the founding of Sydney as a penal colony, a colony which was never expected to amount to much (except to make sure the French didn't end up here). So call it Sydney Day. Or Convict Day. Or Botany Bay Wasn't What Cook Said It Was So We Found This Other Place A Couple Days Later Day.

On an unrelated note (and this was triggered by my facetious reference to Australia declaring its independence from the UK) in the mid90s I was living in London and I was a member of the UK chapter of the Australian Republican movement. We'd meet once in a while in a smokey pub near the Hammersmith flyover and talk about.. I can't remember. Anyway, I had to leave the UK, and I sent them a letter saying that my membership was going to lapse, and that it was because I was leavng the country. I couldn't resist adding that I was moving back to a country that had won its independence from England through armed struggle.

Alvin

The twins want to see 'Alvin and the Chipmunks'. I suggested they should ask their mother. She told them to ask me. For the last couple of weeks it's been passed around like a ticking parcel in a Belfast pub. There are few things worse than an annoying kids' movie and this one look like it has the lot: unsympathetic main characters, catchphrases, brain-jarring levels of hijinks and activity. I still don't know how I survived 'Chicken Little'.

But yesterday I had a brainwave (which I pretended was actually the boys' idea). I asked my sister and she said yes.

She IS woman

I went to the tennis today, the women's semifinals. Ana Ivanovic is the most attractive woman I have ever seen. That's it.

Zinc

When I lived in New York I never read the New Yorker, I just didn't get it. I'd leaf through it if I found it, looking at the cartoons but that was about it. It seemed interesting but at the same time dull - I read once someone complaining that it was full of things like a 16-page article about zinc. Beautifully-written, worthy, but very boring.

The most recent issue (or at the least the most recent I have, mine arrive on a steamship) has an 11-page article about scrap metal. And it's fabulous. So there!

Many years ago, during the Reagan Administration, I was in a bar on Broadway and about 113th (the West End, if anyone remembers it. Crack dealers and Columbia students)and I got talking to a girl who worked for the New Yorker. I was extremely drunk and I think I managed to impress her with the fact that not only had I never read the NYer, I had no desire to do so (my recollection of our talk is very vague, as you can imagine). She then stalked me a bit, in a very low-key way. Slightly spooky, but flattering. Are you out there, Holly? I'm free now.