A million years ago, FB tagged me to write 6 things. Here they are, and yes, I know I am neurotic, don’t be too harsh on me.

-I hate glycerine soap with a passion because it easily melts and leaves marks on the soap dish.
-I genuinely believe that if you wear your nightie or pyjamas inside out, the night lasts longer and you sleep more.
-I judge books by their cover. If I don’t like the cover I don’t buy them.
-I am truly amazed when people get to know me really well and they still love me.
-Once I taught English in a refugee camp of Kurdish people. It was chaos but it felt good.
-When I was 14-15 I only wore clothes of disgusting pistachio colour. At 16 I switched to monochromatic pink and from 17 and on to black.

Films I saw this month
Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (more boring than death itself).
The departed (I loved that. Actually, the 7th fact –see above- could be that I think DiCaprio is an astonishing actor and a mediocre looking guy).
After the wedding (That is a Danish film that turned out to be an old Greek film in terms of subject matter. Old Greek films are highly dramatic. But the acting is great).
My blueberry nights (Jude Law’s hair looks like it smells of fry-ups. Other than that, ok).
Becoming Jane (if it wasn’t for James McAvoy, I would have given up. Also, Anne Hathaway’s English accent is pathetic).
Edward Scissorhands (For the umpteenth time. I love Edward Scissorhands, I love the way he walks).
Atonement (My friend Blondie said it was a bit blah, but I thought it was great even with Keira Knightley who is purely decorative. The book is wonderful).

And I am reading:

The Sweetest Dream  by Doris Lessing (it does have a nice cover)

Lists take the place of not much life as you can understand. Back to translating now.

Greek salad, a staple at my mum’s house: lots of onion, for extra fresh kisses.

 My mum cooks a lot. Now that our son is spending his summer holidays with her, we visit every Sunday and she prepares lunch for us. When she serves us our lunch, she goes back to the kitchen and starts making a fruit salad. So that not a single minute between courses is lost. Because if a minute without eating goes by, if you put your fork down, you might just lose your appetite. After the fruit salad, there is ice-cream. And then, there is coffee. I don’t know what comes next. We usually pass out at that stage. Here are some photos from when I was still conscious.

 I met Brad Pitt again today. I hope you have been reading this blog for some time now, so you know I am not crazy, when I say “I met Brad Pitt again today”. We agreed on 3 articles, one of them being recipes (using their company’s honey). He is a nice guy. As I was leaving he gave me a goodies bag. Why had no one introduced me to their white chocolate milk bath before? You just want to eat the bath water. It smells like heaven and angels and clean babies. Later, in the purgatory that my taxi was, I used it to protect my nose from the smelly driver.

It is a rainy day, so M and I thought it would be good to see a dvd. And we got Elizabethtown. Consider this post a public service. A post to protect the innocent. Don’t see Elizabethtown. It’s the worst movie ever. It is harmful to the eyes. And what the hell is Legolas doing in a road movie that also deals with the themes of parental loss, futuristic trainers and suicide by bicycle? Cameron Crowe has a lot to answer for. But not before he throws away the hallucinogenics.

Why do people learn to be unpleasant and even disgusting- from such an early age? If I had known (this kid is not in my son’s class, he just plays with him when he goes to my mother’s) I would have taken him to the cinema instead.

Which brings us to Capote. No I wouldn’t take my son to see Capote. I liked Capote, and not only because Philip Seymour Hoffman was brilliant in it. But because Capote used to be quite awful, showy, backstabbing, full of himself, ungrateful, offensive to others, exploiting people and taking advantage of them in their time of need, and all this is in this movie, and you still feel sorry for him. Not in a way you’d feel sorry for a good person, but still, sorry. Because he used to be so talented and his words stay with you forever. Anyway, Blondie was right, the director, Bennett Miller, cannibalized on Hoffman and his talent. He made him perform as if he were in a circus to get as many cheering and clapping as possible. Just like Capote, he took advantage of Hoffman when Hoffman needed to show he wasn’t just a supporting role actor but a true protagonist. M was unkind and said I only liked it because of the costumes and the nice atmosphere, which is a weird thing to accuse somebody of. So I was cross at him and said he was silly for not liking the film. But this wasn’t the case for Blondie, who appreciated certain parts of the film, just got bored with it and wanted it to finish so she could have a drink (again, just like Capote did at Harper Lee’s movie, hehe). In fact, In Cold Blood, Capote’s book which focused on the killing of a whole family in a rural part of Kansas and served as the main theme of the movie, refers to Capote as much as to the killers. Because he really was a cold blooded killer of a writer.

The exhibition There’s an old and defunct gas factory in Athens that has long been turned into an Installation and Exhibition Centre by the Municipality of Athens. I went there with M. today to see an exhibition on the city of Athens, "Athens in the 20th century - The great changes". It was great. Full of amazing photographs, films, documents about the city I loathe but have to come to terms with. I didn’t see all of it today. It’s huge. We are probably going back tomorrow. Today we saw the first part, Athens in the beginning of the 20th century, during the Balkan Wars, the Asia Minor catastrophe and during the Second World War. Some photographs brought tears to our (ok, mine) eyes. M. looks at them from a historical point of view but I just look at people’s shoes and hair and eyes. People find a way to go on with life even when the roads are filled with corpses, children always find a way to play, even if it is with broken toys and on an empty stomach.

The film Then we went to see Match Point, Woody Allen’s latest film with Jonathan Rhys-Meyers (he’s brilliant) and Scarlett Johansson and Emily Mortimer and Matthew Goode, whom I didn’t know but is a truly excellent actor. All of them are. I liked this sad film, with the vacant characters who are all more or less evil, in their own way. I know British people object to the way Allen beautifies London, but this is what he does with New York too. And okay, some of the characters are clichéd. The way they talk, the things they care about. My god, if the rich are really like that, they are soon going to die of boredom, all of them. But all these don’t change the fact that this is a very special film. And it is really hard to believe that Allen, at his age, is able of such change. I really couldn’t picture him directing in these wide open spaces of the English countryside. The dream I had the weirdest dream. I dreamt I took the lift and this person, dressed in black, wearing a balaclava and a jacket, the stereotypical suicide bomber, got in with me. And I thought in my dream “I must get out. He is going to blow up the building.” But I didn’t get out. Because I thought (I do think more than I should in dreams) “don’t be racist. Just because he’s wearing a balaclava and a suicide bomber’s jacket, it doesn’t mean he’s going to kill you” (!). And of course he promptly knelt on the lift’s floor and started to pray and then said he was going to push the button on his jacket and we would all die. But something funny happened, his jacket wouldn’t go off and he was pushing buttons nervously and jumping up and down and still, nothing happened. If anybody is a dream interpreter please tell me if I am in mortal danger. The thought People I love distract me. Their voices tell me things I need to know. But they fill my head with their words. I came to the conclusion that I sometimes try to escape them, hence the insomnia. These 3 or 4 hours late at night I am truly alone. They are asleep. I have taken care of them for the most part of the day. I would secretly get angry if they were to wake up now. An awful thing to say. But true. The Birthday This card by Carl Larsson is to wish a happy happy birthday to my dear Connie. A special person. Have fun today Connie! xx

Monstrous Kong, the eighth wonder of the world

King Kong was splendid. Nobody else liked it but I thought it was well made and visually perfect. I almost cried a bit too, towards the end, not that this is any indicator of artistic merit. The men I went to see it with said it wasn’t realistic. Not a valid accusation of a film which has a giant ape as its protagonist. To be fair to Joe, he said he didn’t like the sexual tension between Kong and Ann Darrow (Naomi Watts). I didn’t sense any sexual tension between them, but then again I am a sentimental fool.
And although this is a movie 187 minutes long, I wasn’t bored not even for a second.
What I liked most:
-Dinosaurs trampling on people
-Naomi Watts, so beautiful, elegant, classy
-The skull island
-The portrayal of 1933 New York
-Jamie Bell
-Thomas Kretschmann, the captain of the ship
-Kong, all his movements were so natural, as if he was real

Other news
I bought my favourite Pocket Penguin books. There are 70 in the series and I think I have about 15. My latest additions are:
Street Haunting – Virginia Woolf
The Snobs – Muriel Spark
My Side of the Matter – Truman Capote
Of Pageants and Picnics – Elizabeth David
On Shopping – India Knight
The Dressmaker’s Child – William Trevor

Also, I wanted to inform you that Santa (from North Pole, Canada) sent my son a reply today and he was thrilled. It wasn’t just printed out, there was some handwriting too. Considering Santa’s workload, I think that was a quick reply.

My attention span is getting shorter and shorter. But I just remembered something my son said yesterday: “Attending weddings is not that interesting a pastime. It’s like watching a long, boring film.”

I watched Lost in Translation again last night. I watch it once a week, or once every ten days maybe, but it usually plays in the background, I don’t really watch all of it every time. I know it by heart anyway. I guess it’s my Casablanca. But last night I watched it from beginning to end, along with M., my sister and Joe. Last time I had watched all of it, I was deliriously, childishly, deliciously happy. Now I’m down to earth again but it always lifts me up. Every time, I laugh and cry at different scenes and this time it was when he was singing karaoke "More than this" that Bryan Ferry song. I mean cry, not laugh.

But I laughed so much at the scene where he is drinking at the hotel bar, still wearing that suit they had given him for the ad, with the clips on his back to make it look like it fits him and he turns away and the clips show. Silly, I know. And there’s always that last scene where he whispers in her ear and gets in the car and she turns away and the Jesus and Mary Chain play their distorted, wonderful guitars and sing Just Like Honey: I’ll be your plastic toy. And I will be.

"Everything in this room is eatable. Even I’m eatable. But that is called cannibalism, my dear children, and is in fact frowned upon in most societies." And when Willy tells the kids about a new kind of candy that makes people grow a beard, Mike Teavee, the geeky boy who always plays videogames, tells him, "Who wants a beard?" and Willy Wonka answers: "Well, beatniks for one, folk singers and motorbike riders. Y’know. All those hip, jazzy, super cool, neat, keen, and groovy cats. It’s in the fridge, daddy-o! Are you hip to the jive? Can you dig what I’m layin’ down? I knew that you could. Slide me some skin, soul brother!" And a last one Willy Wonka says, because I don’t want to spoil it for people who haven’t seen it: "Do you know what breakfast cereal is made of? It’s made of all those little curly wooden shavings you find in pencil sharpeners!"