Real Tart

...is a French film based on the true story written by the editor of French Elle magazine who at the age of 43 gets struck down by a massive stroke (while driving his new Jag XJS, can you believe). 
Of course, only in France would a bloke be in charge of a womens’ magazine and only in a French film would everyone in the hospital be beautiful – yes, I mean all the female staff.
Seems Jean-Do, to use his nickname, is completely paralysed (except he can still blink his left eye) but still has a razor-sharp mind and he dictates his book letter by letter to a willing assistant who is of course, er, beautiful.
Anyhow, you might think it would be a boring film but it’s really well made and though hardly likely to leave you chortling in the aisles it’s worth a look.
Talking of having a look, well the bloody bulb went in the projector a couple of weeks ago. If you have a film projector (What! Doesn’t everyone! Really? Good Lord!) then you’ll know that the really expensive thing are the bulbs which last for about as long as the three Lords of the Rings films run (yes, about eight months, but even so).
Sony make this particular one and all I can say is it’s a good business if you can get in it.
Honestly, these things cost almost $1000 – about 500 quid!
Not only that, there’s a waiting list!
And on top of that, if you drop it you will die thanks to all the mercury in it!
But it is excellent when you can sit down in your living room and watch a film like you’re at the cinema, minus the sticky seats, rustle of popcorn bags and some bloke who’s seen it all before telling everyone what he thinks of it.

I was watching The 7.30 Report last night. It’s similar to whatever you have on in Britain now after the news. You know, the programme that examines the news you’ve already seen, but in depth, so you get even more depressed.
Anyway, they had a report from the UK by the ABC’s European Correspondent on how, now how did they put it, oh yes, how Britain is sinking into the North Sea, going down faster than interest rates or house prices.
I tell you, even from here it was depressing. I was saddened to see Woolworths has closed. No more pick-and-mix then, and nowhere to practice shoplifting.
I understand all of the banks except one in Chuggins Bottom-on-Slope (left at Portly Come-Often) now belong to a Mr Gordon Brown and his friends.
It’s rumoured that the plague has reared its head again in Rotherhithe, while a madman stalks the streets of Soho murdering ladies of the night. According to The News of the World, he’s an ex-panto star (behind you! He's behind you!) with no-one left to perform to.
I hear Prince Charles has launched his own range of detox products – for Corgis.
I was stunned but then I thought, at least you still have a car industry, umm, owned by India, and there’s always the City of London financial district, but now I understand that’s all up for sale too.
Meanwhile, on Dartmoor in the freezing fog and dead of night a hound can be heard howling.

Sometime ago I promised to write about George’s 40th birthday party.
For new readers, George is second generation Italian (well, second in Australia). He worked as an accountant for several years before deciding to become a fruit and vegetable shop owner, before chucking that in to become an estate agent, as you do.
He has a large family...
Now, the party invite said, no children. I thought it must be a joke. Not having kids at an Italian party is like forgetting the Pope.
But when I turned up, all dressed in white as demanded on the invite, I realised why it really was x-rated.
I was met at the door by two seven foot tall blonde girls young enough to be my granddaughters, dressed only in brief white see-through French knickers and white push-up bras with sweeping white wings attached to their backs, proferring me drinks. I had to do a double-take. I’m no stranger to scantily clad girls but you don’t expect to see them at a suburban birthday party, or perhaps I’ve just not been going to the right parties.
Outside in the garden, George had a laser show which lit up the surrounding area, er, like all of Sydney, while a sound system cranked out 80’s hits. You didn’t need a GPS to find the house, you just unwound the car window 38 miles away and listened for Joy Division.
There was an industrial-sized dry ice system which at opportune moments gushed out a dense white fog; people stumbled into each other, coughing, like it was London, 1952.
All the usual suspects were there.
Tony Two-Times on account of he says everything twice, as in, “good to see you, good to see you.”
Dom Five-Kids because he wanted lots of kids but they had to stop at five after his wife demanded he leave her alone. Also known as Dom The Snip because eventually she nagged him to have it done to prevent a population explosion.
Cinema Sam because he owns a whole chain of movie houses which allow him to have a garage full of Ferraris, an arrogance that’s bigger than a V12, and no friends.
Uncle Benny, the mafia man. He has a stare that makes you remember him and a handshake that lowers your body temperature.
Pauli Pollie – short for politician – he sits in the NSW parliament where, I’ve been told, “he gets things done”.
Sorry Sam, because when you ask him how’s it going he sighs and says, “not good. Not good at all, mate.” Sigh.
Condito the Consigliere, also known as Con The Con – the lawyer in the family who works closely with Uncle Benny, if you know what I mean.
Back-up Benny – cousin Benito drives a dump truck and is always backing it up to unload something or other in a darkened corner of the State. Also works closely with Uncle Benny...
Five – the five beautiful daughters of Pauli, as in Louisa Five, Francesca Five, etc.
Tutti Two-Beans – Tuttino knows more about coffee making then anyone alive, he says. “It begin, my friend, with just two coffee beans. Like a two lovers lying side by side, but one is green, the other is black. Not the lovers, the coffee beans, capiche?”
Manny Money, also known as Double-Em. Works for an investment bank handling off-shore investments. Rumoured to be close to Uncle Benny.
Maria – George’s wife, from a family of salami makers.
I walked in and almost had an epileptic fit as the light show did that flicker thing. I thought they’d been banned everywhere outside Tenerife, but no, there was one spluttering and staccatoeing like nobody’s business.
At one stage in the evening Louisa Five came up to me and we had a chat. She has long blonde hair and in her figure-hugging white dress she looked like an angel.
“You’ve met my cousin?” asked George, as he always does, a cami-knickered girl on his arm.
“George, I’ve known Louisa for 12 years.”
“Oh,” she said, “you must remember me when I was a fat little 14 year old!”
I smiled. She never been fat, she’d always been beautiful, but even now she didn’t realise it.
At 12.30 the police arrived, for the first time. This being Sydney they joined the party, leaving after 2am when the second contingent arrived.
At 2.30am George’s mother, father and 97-year-old grandmother came to see what all the fuss was about.
The Grandmother fussed over a cami-knickered girl.
She’s only 19, can you believe,” George told me, his eyes glittering, his brow slick with dance sweat, as if she was his new date.
Nonna told the cami-knicker girl how much weight she’d lost, though “you boobinos still like colliseum”, before realising this wasn’t George’s wife in her underwear out here in the garden in the middle of the night.
Half an hour later the dry ice-machine pumped. George’s father screamed, rushed forward, threw a ice-bucket full of water over it.
“There,” he said, brushing his hands, “the fire, it is out.”

The bat I mentioned the other day made another appearance, this time hanging on the wooden windowblind slats in Three's room. I got a wet towel and grabbed him and let him loose in the garden - the bat, I mean.
Then I read online that if a bat has been in a house with sleeping people then everyone needs some anti-bat venom because you might have been bitten and you could easily die, due to the bat being a carrier of all sorts of diseases, all of which have the distinction of killing you quick-smart and having no cure once they take hold.
I called the medical centre whose receptionist said, "oh my son was bitten by a bat once." Then she went on and on about how long it took to get ill, how long it took to recover and what the after effects were and one day he'll walk again, praise the Lord and Hail Mary! and I wanted to shout, Hey! We're all dying here!
Of course, the only advice was to go to the local hospital. Having been to the local hospital before I can tell you I'd only use it if I needed a large car park so I could stop and polish my wing mirrors. I mean, I'd rather die than go there again.
Anyhow, it seems Five has now contracted some big flu type thing which for a moment or two I thought might have been down to the bat but apparently if you get bat flu you die very quickly indeed so I'm guessing it's not that as he is now fighting with Three over a Lego Star Wars drone ship and you have to be fit to do that, what with the punches being thrown and the wrestling moves.
I was going to continue with Mr Wolf (the novel madam, the novel...) today but with both of them at home I decided I'd be better employed making coleslaw (which I've done) and lamb stir fry with black bean sauce and rice, which I'll start doing now, once I can get hold of that damned frisky lamb.
Honestly, I feel like a housewife!
But I'm not sure where I can find one at such short notice.

Two large spiders took up residence this week.
When I say large I am talking looking you in the eye and sizing you up. I went at one of them with the Dyson (the vaccum cleaner, not the washing machine) and he fought and fought but eventually got sucked up. He’s joined another small family of spiders already in the see-through barrel. They go for a spin every now and again and overall seem to be having a fine time.
The other spider has disappeared, so he’s probably working on a strategy which eventually sees me spinning in his web.
Now, this morning at 5am I was up and about and all was quiet and a small bat came into the room from upstairs and flew around silently before squeezing behind the chimney breast. The chimney is a large sandstone affair which goes right up into the roof. As I’ve said before, the ceilings are your cathedrally type so, I don’t know, maybe 25 feet high. Hopefully the bat simply eats all the mozzies which constantly plague us and refrains from flying around indoors at night.
Meanwhile, yesterday I was just getting something out of the Bentley’s boot and Three wandered off down the driveway.
“Daddy!” he shouted, “look”, and I looked around and he was holding a snake above his head.
Australia has the world’s largest collection of deadly snakes and in this part of the world they have signs up this time of year with Watch Out, Snakes About!
If you get bitten by one of the common ones around Sydney, a brown snake, for example, you’ve got about 20 to 30 minutes before you die, maybe a bit longer if you stop moving after the bite. The nearest hospital is about 45 minutes away, even by Bentley Turbo, so I got a tad concerned, but this one was dead.
Yes, it’s very peaceful in the country.

US authorities say a Florida woman phoned the emergency 911 number three times after McDonald's employees told her they were out of Chicken McNuggets.
According to a police report, 27-year-old Fort Pierce resident Latreasa L. Goodman told authorities she paid for a 10-piece last week but was later informed the restaurant had run out.
She said employees refused to give her a refund, saying all sales were final. A cashier told police she offered Goodman a larger portion of different food for the same price, but Goodman became irate.
Police say Goodman was cited on a misuse of 911 charge.
"This is an emergency. If I would have known they didn't have McNuggets, I wouldn't have given my money, and now she wants to give me a McDouble, but I don't want one," Goodman told police. "This is an emergency."
Dispatchers for 911 told police Goodman called the emergency number three times and on each occasion was told an officer was en route.
A McDonald's spokeswoman said the company did not immediately have a comment on the incident.
Presumably they were still chewing it all over.
To me the funny thing is, the police actually sent officers out there, but hopefully to arrest the McLunatic rather than to try and get the nuggets for her.

Have you noticed how economists know absolutely nothing?
What I mean is, they never have a handle on what’s going on. Not ever.
Tuesday they were all tipping another interest rate cut from the Reserve Bank of Australia (our rates are still at just over 3% so still a way to go until we reach the bottom of the pit...).
The rate drop didn’t come because the bank reckoned the economy was still just about alright. Yes, they know nothing either. The following day official figues showed ‘negative growth’ (which is of course not English, but what can you do with people who work with numbers, I ask rhetorically).
The fact is, none of these cardigan-wearing, Volvo-driving, swept-over-hair types have a clue. Barely any of them saw the credit crunch coming. Even a blind man scrabbling to find his abacus could see lending money to people who didn’t even have a job was not really that wise.
Economists always tell you the in-your-face obvious. I heard one of them on TV saying, “it’s likely there will be a rate cut next month.” You do surprise me.
Now, the economists all seem to think this world recession will be beaten by people going out and buying oodles of plastic goods made in China. Oh really? You seriously think people who are just about to be laid off – because let’s face it, it could happen to any of us today or tomorrow - will splurge on more useless tatt? Please!
And, er excuse me, how did we get in this mess in the first place? Do we need an over-paid economist to tell us we bought too much stuff, using too much credit?
Frankly I could do a better job than your chief economist from whichever bastard bank is still paying their grossly inflated wages.
Here’s my professional opinion (based on ownership of a cheque book). It’s a fucked system that will remain fucked for a hugely mighty long time. I mean, no-one is going to spend large, no-one in their right minds is going to buy a car unless they absolutely have to, no-one with half a brain cell is going to get a loan for anything (even if they can get one) and no amount of ‘stimulus packages’ are going to change it. People are hanging on to the folding stuff.
And there is a long way to go before this plays out.
You know, just one thing; there are tens of thousands (maybe even a million or more) home loans in the US that allowed people to pay less than their proper repayments for a set period, the idea being that house prices would continue to rise (a bunch of economists came up with that one - ho-ho!). These loans, which have some wanky acronym like GOTCHA, are about to ‘mature’ which means loads of people won’t be able to pay the higher rates and will lose their homes. 
Can you imagine what’s going to happen then?

There’s a bit of a thing – I was going to say row, but in truth it’s just something kicked up by one of the tabloid TV channels here – about McDonalds charging more for their ‘meals’ in poorer areas of Sydney.
Really, that’s a surprise, what with McD’s being a business and all that. I thought that’s what businesses did.
But anyway, the to-do is all about hitting poor people where it hurts – in their swelling bellies presumably.
The TV channel reckons poor people have enough on their plates (er, or maybe not...) without Maccas adding to their woes with tuppence more on an ice cream cone.
The TV folks reckon poor people have to eat Big Macs and stuff their faces with McNuggets and McFat because they just can’t afford proper food.
What bollocks. If you cook your own food and choose wisely, and I’m not talking about starving yourself, you can eat very well indeed for much less than it costs to take the car down to McD’s, lever yourself out and fall through the doors into your plastic booth.
There’s the added benefit that if you avoid the fat burgers you’ll probably not need to go to the doctor’s, or ultimately hospital, quite so regularly.
Come on, cook your own food.