Below is a review that someone has written about Two Lipsticks and a Lover. I am appalled by it and can only assume this is a frustrated and angry (read unpublished) author in disguise or someone with an unexplained loathing for half-Italian women who live in France. Janine di Giovanni by the way is a heroic journalist who covers the most horrifying war zones and has written several books about them.

Please could those of you who have enjoyed Two Lipsticks click on this link and write a review? I just can’t have this unfair tirade as the only opinion on my book.

And remind me to put onions on my list of pet hates…..

je ne pense pas, 19 Jun 2007 By onion (London, UK) - See all my reviews gosh I think this book must have got published by mistake. Sloppy, cliched, misogynistic, and deeply deeply tedious. I’m not sure what it is about the French that seems to bring out the crapness in journalists but this is a great example (see also Janine di Giovanni etc etc)

In the film Amelie, each character is introduced with a list of what they hate and what they like. As I reversed the car up the drive today it occurred to me that the things we hate remain pretty much the same throughout our lives. For instance, ever since I could drive I have hated reversing and I have hated parking. This is now as likely to change as my ability to do either is.

Other pet hates include:

Letters from the bank (even if I have some money in my account they make me nervous)

Peeling tomatoes

Anything under my nails

Trousers that are too tight

Sore feet

Policemen looking at me (99.9% of the time I am totally innocent, but I feel guilty as hell)

Being late

Missing the beginning of a film or a play

Discussing commuting options at dinner parties

Anchovies

People opening my newspaper before I’ve had a chance to read it

Doors slamming

Hair in the wrong places

Broken nails

Being too cold

Being woken up

And last, but not least, lice. (I am pleased to report that the situation is now under control. I feel rather like Maggie during the Falkland’s War, although my enemy is possibly more dangerous and certainly closer to home. Thank you all for your suggestions.)

I will work on a list of likes for the near future. Starting with driving forwards.

Copyright: Helena Frith Powell 2007

I have made an enemy more menacing than any Bond villain. His aim is not to take over the world, but to wake it up. He struts around the garden crowing at all hours. His most favourite crowing time seems to be 1am, 2am, 3am, 4am, 5am, 6am and then just when I’m settling in for an afternoon nap at 4pm.

I have tried to scare him off by running towards him shrieking in Italian but he just stands there, crowing at me. Rupert threw one of my flip-flops at him which at least got him moving. He was shaken though, not stirred.

Nick the charming South African who runs the place has a healthy big-game attitude to irritating fowl and has ordered his liquidation, but the villain remains at large. I think he must have friends in high places.
Before I came here I had an email from my friend Rita. “Avoid the Jamaican Jerk Chicken,” it read. I don’t want to avoid this one. I want to meet it, on a plate, covered in BBQ sauce.

Copyright: Helena Frith Powell 2007

As I was doing my sun salutes this morning while swaying along to Mika, the new preferred album in the household which has knocked Take That off their number one spot after a record three months, my husband was recovering from a night of partying with my best friend and some of her friends in Delhi.

Mika, by the way, is brilliant. Tracks 1,2 and 8 are guaranteed to put you in a dancingly good mood and the others aren’t shabby either. My sun salutes are much more lively now, even if I have been kept awake by children most of the night, as I was last night. I mean, I know he’s only three, but doesn’t he realise how RUDE it is to come barging into my room at 4am, shout at me about his light being switched off and then spend the rest of the night snoring next to me?

My husband went to a nightclub where apparently tout Delhi was gathered. He mingled with top models (all as tall as him and he’s over 6 foot 2), celebs and of course my friend Iona.

Iona and I used to go to nightclubs when we were 20. I have to admit that I hated them then, although I pretended to love them. I even hated them when I was 17 and did practically nothing else. Goodness only knows what I’d think of one now. I mean I love the dancing, but all that noise, smoke and queuing for the loo is just too tedious.

Another thing I don’t miss is the prats you meet at nightclubs. My husband told me he shared a taxi back with a rather handsome, surly Frenchman with more hair than me (which is tricky considering I have at least two other people’s heads of hair as well my own.)

He tried to talk to the hirsute one who was monosyllabic. Until he asked him what he was doing in Delhi.

“I model, and I write,” he said with a flick of his locks. Yeah, whatever, as Bea would say.

Meanwhile I have finally had a text from Heathcliff. It sounds like he will be in Devon when we are there. Now I just have to make sure Olivia and Bea don’t fall in love with his sons. I know Olivia is far too sensible, but I fear for my little Bea-Sting….

Copyright: Helena Frith Powell 2007

According to yesterday’s Daily Mail Jemima Khan and Hugh Grant are back together. I’d like to give Ms Khan just one piece of advice. Never trust a man who has shoulders smaller than you do.

When I was in LA recently I had the misfortune of seeing Hugh Grant’s latest film; Music & Lyrics. I went with my screenwriting friend Jennifer (who lost the will to live after the first scene) and Constance, a legal secretary who moonlights as a pilates teacher, actress and stand-up comedienne (only in LA). Anyway, just as we thought things couldn’t get any worse, there was Hugh, naked from the waist up.

“Ugh,” said Constance, burying her head in her popcorn. “He’s soooo British.”

Jennifer nodded. “He has the body of a fourteen-year-old.”

Next day I was wandering down Venice Beach. Apart from the clinically obese men (and there were a few) everyone else seemed to have a decent body. OK, so some of them were young, like the surfer who walked towards me unzipping his wet suit revealing a rather well-formed chest and a six-pack.

That six-pack really got me thinking. And I realised it was the first time I had ever seen one in REAL LIFE. How deprived is that? Growing up in England, you just don’t come across them. Six-packs are not on general view, unless they’re made of hops and malt.

So why is this? Are they much more intellectual? Or just too busy to get to the gym? Do English women not care? Jemima clearly doesn’t.

Copyright:Helena Frith Powell 2007

I see that in this week’s Sunday Times I share the dubious honour of being a columnist alongside Vladimir ‘Stalin’ Putin. I realise that good commentators on Russia are hard to find, mainly because he’s had them all murdered, but I am still horrified.

Since Putin came to power in 2000 fourteen journalists have died in questionable circumstances. I found his column dreary bordering on unreadable. I would have preferred to have read something by the brave and brilliant Anna Politkovskaya but she was gunned down in October last year in the lift of her apartment block. Putin was widely assumed to have ordered the killing due to her coverage of the Chechen war. The latest journalist to die was only a few weeks ago; Ivan Safronov, a military affairs correspondent for Kommersant “fell” from a window.

But Putin is not only murdering journalists. What is happening in Chechnya is beyond belief and now it seems he is not above attacking his own people. His police broke up two anti-government protests recently, arresting the key speakers and beating the protestors. Also reported in the Sunday Times this week was the fact that demonstrators were dragged off trains on their way to demos last week. So much for the “democracy” he so long-windedly drones on about in his less-than-riveting column. Instead of writing this drivel himself, which many of us on the Sunday Times are perfectly capable of doing, he should be allowing journalists in Russia the freedom to express their views without fear of extermination.

I wonder what I will be reading this week? Maybe a column on good farming policy by Robert Mugabe? ‘How to be nice to political dissidents’ by China’s Hu Jintao? ‘Look after your Nobel peace prize winners’ by Burma’s Than Schwe? I can hardly wait for next Sunday.

Copyright: Helena Frith Powell 2007