Well, Thursday evening we went to see the new "Star Wars" movie. No, I'm not such a raving fan as to have to see it the day it came out...but Patrick is! So we went, with his mother. It wasn't great. The effects and set-pieces were good - I really liked the "Charge of the Light Brigade", and the car chase near the beginning. And the costuming was cool; I especially liked Amidala's leather corset thing (slurp!). But the writing was terrible - if the characters had actually sat down and used their brains for two minutes, there'd have been no plot! And Anakin's oh-look-this-is-foreshadowing outbursts were unconvincing...though that may have been the fault of the other major flaw; the really wooden acting. Ewan McGregor is obviously still trying to live up to the shadow of Alec Guinness, and as for Hayden Christiansen...why did they cast this twerp? He can't act, and he's not even particularly pretty. The only drool-fodder, in fact, was Natalie Portman (especially in that corset!) and Samuel L. Jackson. Not an impressive film at all.
Friday was a pretty lively day, at any rate. It rained, heavily and continuously, from about the time we left the cinema on Thursday night to some point on Saturday morning. And my left boot sprung a leak. I hate having wet feet. I squelched all day. Yuck!
Anyway, I left work a touch early to get the twenty-five past bus instead of my usual quarter-to one. Naturally, the twenty-five past bus was late. So I got home around the usual time, even wetter. And had to rush to feed cats, change wet clothes (and boots!), and get out again. First down to the polling station to vote, and then on to get a bus into town. And of course, having spent all that time rushing and worrying about being late, I got to the Dublin Writers' Museum quarter of an hour before I was supposed to meet Hallie and Cara. So I stood on the doorstep of said building in the rain, smoking a cigarette very slowly and getting wetter.
The wait was enlivened slightly by the arrival of a young man in waterproof jacket and trousers, who stopped on the step to remove these accoutrements; I watched him with sympathy, as waterproof trousers are a pain to get out of even when they're not wet. When they are wet, they're a nightmare. We exchanged a few words about the weather, and he went in, clutching his dripping bundle sheepishly.
Eventually, Hallie and Cara arrived, bang on the dot of half past seven, and we all went in to drip in the foyer. There, we failed to meet Hallie's friend who was to get us in free, but another organiser talked nicely to us (and didn't ask us for money)...and told us that...Diana Wynne Jones would probably not be there! And, well, the entire object of this damp exercise being to see DWJ, we were unhappy. We knew, of course, about the computer glitch in the British Air Traffic Control system which had delayed every plane over there. And we knew, too, that it was due to DWJ's travel jinx. But her jinx, though it delays her, does let her get where she's going eventually, so we still had hope. We accepted the offer to go get a glass of wine and decide whether to stay or not.
By the coat-rack (where I somehow managed to get the last hanger), we met the young man of the waterproof trousers again, who turned out to be Joe, the fourth Dublin-based listmember we were planning to meet. He admitted that he'd thought I might be me, on the doorstep, but had no idea why he hadn't asked me. *shrug*
Anyway, we all went in and got a glass of wine (except Cara, who being twelve, had Seven-Up), and met up with Hallie's friend...who, after a few minutes, came back to us to say that DWJ would be there, and was even then on her way. General rejoicing!
At length, we went up entirely too many stairs to the room where the talk was to happen. After a while, one Jim Sheridan gave a speech, which was funny in parts, but (since I couldn't just then remember who he was) incomprehensible in others. (Turned out he's a film director.) And at long last, DWJ appeared and gave her talk. It was wondrous, and funny, and serious, and cool. It was about how books are really written, as opposed to how writers tell interviewers that they're written. It was an interesting experience, listening to the speech as a fan, as a writer, and as the one person in our group who had pen and paper, and was therefore de facto note-taker (the rest of the DWJ list would never forgive us if we didn't tell them all about the speech!).
Afterwards, she did a short signing session - short because this was the opening of a Children's Books Summer School, and most of the people there were academic types rather than fans, and because DWJ was very tired after the nightmare of trying to get from Bristol to Dublin. So we got to meet her, just briefly, and have our books signed, and she seemed pleased to meet some people who read her books for fun. We also talked (at more length) to her publishers' person who was there, a nice lady named Jo, who mentioned the publicity tour for her next book (due out next April - aagh! A whole year to wait!) and hinted that Dublin might feature on the itinerary. Fingers crossed.
And then we just sat and chatted and drank more free (and rather nasty) wine until the management threw us out! A very happy evening. I have met one of my favourite authors! And she's nice, and funny, and I hope I'm that nice to my fans when I'm a BNA!
Saturday was something of an anti-climax after that (but then, what wouldn't be?!), and was mostly occupied by such boring domestic details as laundry and grocery shopping, and listening avidly to the radio as the election results came in. It's rather odd to wake up at 7am the morning after an election and have some of the results already available (damn electronic voting)! And what results! Nora Owen of Fine Gael lost her seat in Dublin North, while in the same constituency, Trevor Sargent of the Green Party topped the poll! (I remember when he first got elected, and scraped in on about the eleventh count, deemed elected without meeting the quota.)
It was, in fact, a perfectly disastrous election for Fine Gael. They've lost about twenty seats (there are 166 altogether), including a bunch of big names; besides Nora Owen, Alan Shatter, Alan Dukes, Brian Hayes and Austin Currie are all gone. Michael Noonan, needless to say, has resigned as party leader. But, though it was worst for Fine Gael, other parties lost big names too; Dick Spring of the Labour Party lost his seat, and Ruairi Quinn only scraped back in. And while Fianna Fail did very well (though not quite making the overall majority they wanted), they lost their deputy leader, Mary O'Rourke.
Who was it good for? Well, besides FF, mostly Sinn Fein (5 seats) and the Greens (6 seats). And the Progressive Democrats, who also got about 6 seats. There are still about four recounts in progress, though, so we can't be certain for another few days. But it's looking like Fianna Fail will form a minority government, supported by a few Independents. They're talking to Independents now, anyway, rather than the PDs, with whom they formed a coalition government last time out.
posted by Dorian at
7:21 PM
