Lidding Pandora

A woman walks out of the Heathrow Express at terminal 1 2 and 3 and she's left her mobile phone on her seat. The ticket collector is conveniently placed to pick up the blackberry, delay the train's departure, run after the woman the ten yards it takes to get to her and her luggage, and say you forgot your phone. I didn't I don't want it I left it there deliberately, put it back. She's just got off a plane at Terminal 4, and now she's getting off the train before it reaches the city centre. He's so full of questions and the gleaming gadget in his hand. Well you cannot leave things like this on the train it's a security issue. She stops and reaches for the phone and apologises with a smile. It's Tuesday and everyone will be calling me about the AA meeting. Addictions lurking in our pandora boxes, at a certain stage do we all fight addiction to substance to drink to habit to an undying love to sex to anything we feel we can't live without. Many words have been spilt over this topic and I shan't bother to add to the spillage, but a shrink down the road thinks I'm a good candidate for an addiction of sorts and that I should put a lid on that box. I strongly disagree well most addicts do disagree says the shrink that's why one of the twelve steps to recovery is admission.

The week has been taken up with penning new dramas with all that entails from the research to the self doubt to the all night confusion and it occurs to me that writers are vastly underrated after all a great deal of jobs rely on what they write from the producers to the actors to the set designers and even the carpenter nailing in the walls every job is waiting for the script. I've been at it for a while now still motivated by my recent travels and the constant teasing of my children who listen to every tale and pitch make suggestions and conclude whether an ending is rubbish or ok and urge me to finish that scene like that and dislike my leaning towards tragedy and reckon I'm a bit loopy. The deadline is for the end of the week which means today and it's going to be a blown deadline because I can see the end and it won't come now but I'm halfway down the hill so everyone is just going to have to wait.

Being back in the city which no-one is ever tired of has me feeling pretty knackered. There is a bit too much going on the football's been excellent and I can't wait to get back to the Emirates and catch Arsenal in the flesh there are a splattering of new films and even a theatre piece by the nobel laureate Wole Soyinka and even more books on the way not so much about the African continent but about the African condition in the 21st century and like old cheese we are maturing into mellow acceptance of the world as it is not as we would like it to be and the parents among us are anxious about their children's inheritance so the city's delights will just have to go unsavoured because it is the age of saving and I head off to Acton West London late at night for one of those rare gathering for folk in my industry. There are faces here and there from the past from the present from some island and the common denominator is film and television and broadcasting and an actress has joined our group and the host is feebly trying to put his children to bed as the adults tuck in to his wife's excellent Lebanese cooking. Dish after dish does the rounds and everyone has brought top notch bottles of wine and single malt and folk are in from Mombasa from Paris from LA and the boys from Smoking Dogs are here too fresh from their latest telly success a doccie on an oil spillage near Alaska that set the sirens on environmental damage.We eat and catch up and the man from the island says he's on the mainland now desperately trying to do something for Tanzanian film and why don't we talk and every producer knows the value of an ideas factory how else would they tap into the arts funds and I go yeah sure this is my producer and let him field the webs of intentions. The producer from Smoking Dogs says he cannot believe that with all the television hours available how the beeb gets away with commissioning so few films from people like us it is just outrageous and I reckon it's important to keep the indignant anger at bay and I'm impressed by the young auteur from Mombasa who's made a film mixing real news footage withe her own written fiction to tell the story of the embassy bombings and there's a great deal of material in our immediate past and more of that is needed but as the mellow mood steers us from sumptuous dish to mouth watering wine we tend to chill down a bit as befits an early morning at the end of dreary March. Then we learn that the hostess has published a book called the The Secret Life of Syrian Lingerie and that seems to be about as good a note as any on which to end the evening and the film talk lingers but old faces renew conversations interrupted three four or five years ago but the nagging thought of what Syrian housewives get up means the book will not be the end of it. The truth in Syrian lingerie has been out for some time and we now know that beneath those still black dresses a great deal of sexuality is afoot in all manner of underwear and she sends her husband up to the loft and he brings down a box of the great Secret and we pack up laughing like year seven school kids the men and the women and hold aloft the g-strings decorated with electronically singing canaries or the curtains that double up as a saucy bra and the mobile phone pants.Then for a while the host and the producers and the man from the island and the head of diversity from the film council and the actress soon to appear in dr who all gleefully touch and hold the intimate last defenses of Syrian women and what a clever idea it was to make a coffee book special of this closed little world and how it clashes with the austere preaching of that religion of our age.We leave our half finished bottles of single malt and head back in the early morning taxis high on the possibilities of the future and promise a collaboration and a meeting here and there and at one point I declare how tired I am from working the keyboard for two solid days and someone laughs at me and says that's what people do everyday of their lives and how odd it is that I'm complaining and I smile back and think you silly bitch each to his own I'm finding it tiring and I don't much care if my work is not the same as driving the tube train but decide to put a lid on Pandora's box of annoyance.