The Woman Who Talked Too Much

Updating my website mariephillips.co.uk - which is pretty awful, by the way, mostly because I designed and maintain it myself, and I'm not exactly an expert at that kind of thing, and I sort of can't be bothered, ahem... The plan is to redo it when my next book comes out ("when", not "if", ever the optimist). Well, anyway: updating it, I realised I had completely forgotten to mention that I have a new publication out and an event to support it. (That's an event in addition to the flourishing Bookswap, every third Thursday of the month at the Windsor Firestation. It's £5 to get in and I believe we are the only literary event to let you in for free if you bring a home-baked cake. But moving on.)

The piece in question is called 'Change' and you can find it in the Plan International / Vintage anthology Because I am a Girl.

(I notice Amazon are selling it at a discount. Hmm. All the profits go to Plan, so...)

'Change' is an account of my visit to Uganda to witness Plan International's work there. Without wishing to spoil the story, I was so appalled, and say as much, that Plan had to publish an official retraction straight after my piece in the book. There's a cracking review of it over here - thank you, Independent on Sunday.

What's that? You want an extract, you say? Oh god, I'm probably not allowed. But here you go, as long as you promise to buy the book. It's my first day in Kampala, the capital of Uganda, and I have been taken to visit a project which works with prostitutes there:

The streets of Kampala are not a safe place to sell sex. The women complained of rape from clients, rape from the police who periodically round them up to clean up the streets. Then there are the other risks, notably from HIV and AIDS. Condom use is not popular amongst johns in Uganda, and even if the prostitutes insist on it, it’s easy to get around the issue by insisting on sex in a dark corner and then lying about the condom. And anyway, as one pointed out: “You can get a man to use a condom but you are still a sex worker.” These are not happy hookers. The only time anybody laughed was when my Plan chaperone mentioned the Dutch model of legalised and regulated brothels, which reduced the entire group to hysterics.

The Moonlight Stars project aims to provide sex workers with healthcare - AIDS tests, condoms and so on - as well as training and financial support to help them set up their own businesses outside the sex industry, such as baking or hairdressing. But the funding has run out. So while Moonlight Stars aims to provide healthcare, financial support and training, what it actually provides is “outreach”. I asked the women what outreach is. They told me that it’s going out and telling other prostitutes about what Moonlight Stars aims to provide. It’s not my last encounter with “outreach” in Uganda. This is probably the right place to mention: outreach is cheap.

Before we left, the women asked us to give them money for the project. We explained that it doesn’t work that way, that we have to report back to Plan in London who make the funding decisions. They were not impressed. In my notes I have written: “I felt as if they were thinking: who the fuck are you and what are you here for if you’re not going to give us any money?”

Cheerful stuff, as you can see. The talk's on Thursday March 4th at Central United Reformed Church, Grove St, Bath, 6.15pm, £7 / £6 concessions, and my fellow speakers will be Deborah Moggach and Xiaolu Guo. You can get more info and buy tickets here. It should be an interesting, challenging, controversial evening. Hope to see some of you there.

Followers of my sister's blog Blogzambique will be pleased to hear that baby Eva arrived this morning, a week early, healthy and happy with lots of dark hair. I haven't met her yet so I don't have any pictures, but in the meantime, I'm stealing this cute shot from Rebecca's blog of the baby clothes waiting for their new owner:

By Martha Pack, age 8.

My novel Gods Behaving Badly has come out in about 20 countries so far. In some places it has done well (my home turf of UK, for example.) In other countries less so (people of Holland, why hast thou forsaken me?) The country it has done best in so far is Canada. To my astonishment and I'd guess that of my publishers too, it went to number 1 in the fiction charts and I had great fun a while back doing a lightning book tour round Toronto and Vancouver, appearing in all kinds of newspapers and on radio and TV. I try to repay Canada in my own small way, for example by having the theme tune to The Littlest Hobo on my iPod and by really, really liking the word Saskatchewan.

I am guessing that Canada is not at the forefront of the ereader revolution, though, because according to my most recent royalty statement, I have sold a grand total of one electronic copy of Gods Behaving Badly in Canada since its release in December 2007. One. More may have been sold since, as that statement only went up to the end of September, but even so. One.

Here's the thing. I really want to know who I have sold that one ebook to. Who is this intrepid Canuck? What made them decide to download my book rather than buy a hard copy? Are they typically a maverick, renegade kind of person, or is this the first time that they have - to their knowledge - done something that the whole of the rest of Canada has not yet done? I guess it's possible, being - as they evidently are - at the cutting edge of digitisation, this individual might have made it as far as my blog. It might even be you. I'm guessing it probably isn't though. But it could be you. Hello.

I am now officially on the search for my one electronic reader in Canada. If I can find him or her - perhaps with the help of some friendly blog or Twitter mentions, hint hint - I will offer them an old-fashioned paper Canadian edition, signed. (Will ereaders kill the signed edition? Discuss.) I don't know how they'll prove their identity but I'm sure we can figure that out. A download receipt, maybe? Anyway, I'd really love to hear from you, Canadian ereader, so if you make it this far, leave me a comment with your e-mail address... and I hope you enjoyed the book.

In today's Guardian Review's habitual summary of book reviews, here are the names of the writers across various papers who have reviewed Martin Amis's latest, 'The Pregnant Widow': Aravind Adiga, Philip Hensher, Harry Mount, Richard Bradford, Bharat Tandon. And here are the names of the people who have reviewed Andrea Levy's new novel 'The Long Song': Ruth Scurr, Kate Kellaway, Amanda Craig. As my old maths teacher used to say: notice anything?

MEN AND WOMEN OF BRITAIN: YOU CAN NEVER ENJOY OR APPRECIATE ANY NOVEL WRITTEN BY THE OPPOSITE GENDER. GET IN YOUR COLOUR-CODED CARS AND GO HOME.

A film which is much better than you might expect, though not exactly braving the dizzy heights of "good", is Miss Congeniality 2: Armed and Fabulous. Mainly I liked it for the following reasons:

- I have a bit of a weakness for Sandra Bullock doing funny (as opposed to Sandra Bullock doing serious, which sends me screaming to the hills.)
- Funny Sandra Bullock gets to wear a lot of exceedingly stupid outfits in this film.
- It's a romantic comedy with no romance. SB's character is not rewarded by social acceptance in the form of love at the end of the film, as per every other movie about women; instead she has a make-under, dumps the stupid outfits, goes back to wearing trouser-suits and sensible hair, and makes friends with her equally unglamorous female bodyguard.
- There's a scene set in a Las Vegas bar filled with female impersonators.
- The presence of William Shatner and Abraham Benrubi.

Not enough to get your running to the DVD shop I agree, but say you were ill, and it was being repeated on ITV2, you could do worse than switching it on and seeing if anything in the first twenty minutes made you laugh. Laugh might be too much. Smile, anyway.

Having said that, I couldn't help but notice the egregious inclusion of the one scene that no romantic comedy is complete without: the moment early on where the woman goes back to her empty apartment and eats a lonely dinner while miserable music plays. Think of any romantic comedy you like. Say Sandra Bullock again in the otherwise great fun Two Weeks' Notice, so pathetic that her local Chinese takeaway knows her order by heart. Or Jennifer Lopez in The Wedding Planner with her obsessive compulsive meal, perfectly neatly presented with hospital-corners-folded napkin. (Now seems as good a time as any to mention that The Wedding Planner is so awful I cried at the end from the sheer futility of living a life that had included watching it.) I can't be bothered to list them all, but once you notice, it's impossible to unnotice, and now my heart sinks when the female lead closes the door of her apartment, says hello as often as not to her cat, and the weepy music swells as she opens the fridge.

They have to play the weepy music, because otherwise there's a risk that you might notice that the female lead has a really cool apartment in the centre of a really cool American city - New York, or San Francisco say - and it really doesn't seem like such a miserable option to sit down in front of her really cool product-placement flatscreen TV and stuff her face with delicious food. In fact some might argue that one of the perks of being single and living alone is that you get to eat exactly what you want, when you want, and there is no such thing as table manners. If I ever make a romantic comedy, there will be happy, joyful music when the heroine eats alone, and we will only graduate to the weepy stuff when the batteries of her vibrator have run flat or some heavy boxes need lifting.

You're wrong about the dental floss, you know. And now I've discovered that you can apparently only get Medium toothbrushes at the supermarket, and I prefer Soft.

Last night I dreamt of David Tennant. He invited me to his house, and I got to play with his large and extremely impressive...

...collection of Smurfs.

To my subconscious: what are you doing? And why?