mns  2005-09-30 20:20   

Summer has ended, and a chilly dampness is apparent. Even Mr Apache (the chilli plant in the living room window) does not have quite the enthusiasm he previously portrayed. I’m still harvesting chillies – several a week in fact – but the new ones aren’t growing at the same rate, nor ripening so fast.
My next book – due out in hardcover in March 2006 and in paperback three months after – is now with the copy editor, and I’ve started another one. I can look back for the first time over the past few months since I came to London and try to assess what I’ve done and what has interested me.

Let me start with my visits to The Kings Head – both pub and theatre on Upper Street, less than two minutes from where I live. I've now seen three plays there: A State of Grace, Who’s the Daddy and Huis Clos – all were excellent.
A State of Grace is a new play by a new playwright, and while only an hour long, held me engrossed as two characters led the audience through a gruelling journey of uncovering the truth about what Grace had done and left us in a state of shock.
Who’s the Daddy has to be the funniest play I’ve ever seen. Two hours of non-stop laughter as Boris Johnson (played by Tim Hudson), Michael Howard (Saul Reichlin) and David Blunkett (Paul Prescott (without dog) and an excellent supporting cast led us through the tangled romantic intrigues of the Spectator scandals. If it comes your way – it is an absolute must that you see it.
I had read Sartre’s Huis Clos some years ago. It says in the programme it is considered his most influential play. Who of us has not heard of his notion of hell as being with other people? Well, Huis Clos describes that hell so perfectly. Forget one’s childhood notions of devils and prongs and everlasting fire; this is so wonderfully written and so well enacted that I left the theatre with the horrible feeling that Sartre is right – hell is other people.

I’ve joined the Woodberry Bridge Club – which thankfully is in walking distance as I’m not the best at using the Underground late at night. After a recent trip to Dublin, coming back late at night through Kings Cross and finding the Northern Line closed, I emerged onto the street to find myself in the middle of a brawl. There was a horrible feeling of not knowing whether to go to the left or the right, and I panicked as I realised there was no way I was ever going to be able to push my way through on to a bus, and so I started to walk home. MISTAKE. BIG mistake. If I was scared outside King’s Cross, it’s nothing to how I felt ten minutes later alone on Pentonville Road.
Anyway, the Woodberry is a friendly social club and there is a host so I’m guaranteed a game and some company.

The other site I would like to direct every reader to is The Poppy Project. Hundreds of women – possibly thousands – are trafficked every year, kidnapped, sold into sexual slavery, abused and degraded, trapped, raped – over and over and over…
I saw one of the television documentaries and I cried. Lucky me; I cried in the comfort of my own home knowing that I was safe and would go to bed that night, loved and protected.
Log on to the site, write to your MP and ask for the following;

· Ratify and incorporate into domestic law the UN Protocol on trafficking - the Palermo Protocol. This aims to prevent, suppress and punish trafficking in persons, especially women and children, supplementing the United Nations Convention Against Transnational Organised Crime.
· Sign and ratify the UN Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Their Families (1990).
· Introduce legislation to make it illegal to withhold, conceal, damage or destroy another person's passport and other identity document in order to restrict their freedom of movement or maintain their labour or services (in line with Article 21 of the 1990 Migrant Workers' Convention).