i told you i was trouble, you know that i'm no good.
I've been watching Secret Diary of a Call Girl, since series three just started. I think I like the storylines best this series: Belle/Hannah's newfound literary side job, her sister's interference, Bambi's new regular client who seems like more fun than most regular boyfriends. And better, there aren't so many pointless extended shots set to music like there were in series one (on a twenty-minute show. If you can't even fill twenty minutes why bother writing for television.)
Also watched the interview with Billie Piper and Dr. Brook Magnanti, who wrote the Belle du Jour blog and books. Dr. Magnanti seems a lovely and down-to-earth, and a good writer. I thought while watching that she would make a good companion for the Doctor; she's very intelligent, and already a doctor herself, and she said that originally she wanted to be a physicist, so she could discover things that nobody else had ever seen before. Oh, and she's open-minded, that helps when traveling with the Doctor too.
But I always love Belle's writing more than the show. Despite the graphic and lovingly painted nature of the books, the thing that I saw the most was the curiosity of it all, and how she didn't always take sex personally. That distance is something that makes sense to me. What I like best of all, though, is the descriptions of London, these little snapshots of strangers drifting together in a city where beauty is found as you walk to the tube or get lost at night or greet the dawn. At this section, she's just left a client who, in addition to her fee, gave her a bottle of bubbles. She runs into a friend on the way home and they decide to drive around London the rest of the night.
I wasn't feeling tired and neither was he. 'You want to blow bubbles?' N asked, as we drove over a bridge. We turned and went up the leafy Embankment, and the growing light of the morning made the water glint darkly. N knows about the tides of the Thames, he's seen bodies dragged out of the river, he tells me where the terrapins and seals go when the weather is warm. He pointed to a building with a swimming pool in the basement, said he used to swim there when he was at school. And at that bridge, he remembers the woman who threw herself off it, pockets full of pebbles, but who didn't realise the air would catch in her layers of clothing so she couldn't sink. When the rescue boats came to drag her out she fought them off- 'Put me in, put me in!' I sat back, eyes half-closed, as he told me more of the city lore. We ended up at Charing Cross station at sunrise, blowing soapy scraps of bubble juice diluted with manky Thames water onto the first commuters of the day.
And I just can't wait to be back in that city, living there and having an ordinary life, living there. I wish I had gone down to the Embankment the day I left, to watch the sun rise like Ashley did. Wish I'd never left.