I really didn't mean to say that no one in Manchester wears clothes

It's the kind of thing that just comes out when everyone's joking, and you're being recorded, and you're trying to be funny and it just sorta doesn't work but *anyway*, here's my appearance on the Guardian's marvellous Sounds Jewish podcast. More things like this, please: British Jews behaving as if it's OK to talk about Jewishness! Careful, if we do this too much the goyim might notice we're here.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/series/soundsjewish

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And in other things one might like to listen to... Passover is only seven weeks away. A sense of dread and anticipation is settling over Hendon, people are shifting bookcases and vacuuming curtains to get rid of any last trace of chametz, and smallish boxes of not-specially-nice biscuits are going on sale for £20 each.

So, as an antidote, how about having a listen to this: http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/specials/1357_slavery_today/page3.shtml

Passover's about freedom from slavery. Why don't we all forgo one of those boxes of biscuits and give the money to an anti-slavery organisation instead?

Once you start looking for these things they're everywhere

So according to the Guardian Angelina Jolie is "too famous" to convince as Marianne Pearl in the new film "A Mighty Heart". In fact, the Times agrees. I haven't seen the movie, don't know if it's good, don't know if Angelina's performance is great or rubbish. But this strikes me as an astonishing thing to say. Surely the whole business of being a film actor is to become, and remain, famous?

I wonder why one never hears that Russell Crowe is "too famous" to convince as John Nash. Or that George Clooney is "too famous" to portray Fred Friendly in Good Night and Good Luck? Could it be because  we expect male actors to build careers, to take on a wide range of roles, to be judged by their acting skill and not just their looks? But female actors must forever be the ingenue, enchanting us with their youthful beauty and then vanishing from the scene to let some other similar-looking woman take their place? 

Watching a movie of course involves as much suspension of disbelief as watching any other type of theatre; we have to decide to forget that we know that face (just as we decide to forget that we're in a darkened cinema, that music doesn't usually suddenly strike up at emotional moments, that people aren't actually 2D... and so on). One would imagine it wouldn't be harder to do that for one actor than another - unless they were doing a bad job, which neither of these articles suggests.

Now, fame implies power, at least in the world we live in.  Perhaps it's that power that these journalists are responding to. What they're saying is not that Angelina Jolie is "too famous" to play this role, but that she is "too famous", full stop. A powerful woman? Unbelievable.

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And another thing. Why are there no East Asian leading men in Hollywood except in kung fu movies? There are white leading men (including Jewish leading men, the hidden minority), obviously and, since the groundbreaking work of Sidney Poitier in the 1960s, black leading men. There are a few Hispanic leading men, and some with Native American backgrounds, but why no one with ancestry in China or Japan or Korea or the Philippines or, or, or...? This is one of those things which, having thought of it, I now can't believe I never noticed before.

Not to mention that it's illegal

Sometimes, I hear someone say something so stupid that it causes me to stop for a moment, re-evaluate my axiomatic beliefs and try to work out whether the laws of physics can have suddenly altered. I had an experience like this recently when I was ranting - as I frequently do - about the male/female pay gap in this country (as for example). The person nearest to my ranting grasped his wife's hand and said to me "why does it matter if men and women aren't paid the same? Once you get married, it all evens out."

So, because I had to think this through carefully and because it's always interesting to have to back up beliefs that are so fundamental that you've held them forever, here's why it's important:

• we can presumably leave aside basic fairness and thoughts about what might happen if, horrors, not everyone got married and whether it's OK for single women to be much worse off than single men.
• on average, in Britain, women earn £23,000 a year and men earn £31,000 a year. In London those figures are £29,000 a year, vs £38,000 a year.
• that is, in London, essentially the difference between being able to afford to buy a house/flat and not being able to.
• which means that it's, for example, the difference between an abused woman knowing that she can take her children and set up a new home for her family and knowing that she's financially trapped.
• it is also, in millions of nice middle-class homes across the country the reason that, when perfectly reasonable people sit down to decide "which of us should drop some hours to take care of the children" purely on the sensible basis of finances, it is almost always the women whose hours come down.
• it's therefore the reason that men are deprived of the opportunity to make a choice to spend more time with their children, a thing which many men are rightly getting increasingly angry about.
• and finally, I would submit, that imbalance in child-rearing is at the root of some rather unpleasant consequences in social and psychological terms. If little girls grow up feeling that their daddies are never really there as much as they want them, and little boys grow up seeing that what daddies do is to be distant from the family, is it any wonder that we end up with adult women who are always chasing after the men who don't really want them, and adult men who feel they need to be constantly on the run from family life?

There's more than this but, off the top of my head, that's it for the time being. It's good to rant.

Smug as a smuggler

So, I won that award. After which I was naturally so excited that I had to go and lie down in a darkened room for six weeks, which explains the prolonged lack of content. Or not. Actually, I went away to work on The New Book (TM) and to try to ignore the voices in my head saying "it'll never be as good as the first one, you know, never ever ever". (This answers the question I got asked at a reading the other day: "Do you ever doubt yourself?" At the time I and the other writers involved answered with a peal of hollow, desolate laughter.)

I suppose, since this is nominally a blog about being a new writer, I ought to say what it's like to win an award. The answer of course is that it's wonderful. Beyond wonderful. It's like the day the boy you really like finally asks if you fancy going to the pictures, or when you get a call from the job you wanted but were woefully underqualified for, to ask if you can start on Thursday.

There were a lot of very glamorous media types there, compared to whom all the authors looked a bit bewildered and intimidated. Or perhaps that was just how I felt. I must have shaken hands with 50 people, many of whom I recognised by name but not face, which is an unusual kind of fame these days, I think. 150 years ago most people would have been hard-pressed to recognise Queen Victoria - today it's easy to recognise celebritites, but hard to work out where you recognise them <i>from</i>. At the Orange party, though, I kept being introduced to people I didn't recognise at all whose hands I shook while mentally processing the name and finally coming up with "oh! you wrote that wonderful book about..." Fortunately, I don't think I accused anyone of writing the wrong book.

I read a strange article a couple of days after the Orange party complaining that the invitations weren't very environmentally friendly (they were orange perspex squares) and what was she supposed to do with hers? I don't know about that journalist, but personally I gathered up half a dozen and intend to use them as coasters. "Oh, that? Yes, that's the invitation from the night I won that prize. No, no, it was nothing really." Not that I'm feeling smug, no no.

In any case, the thing that I was actually intending to write about but seem to have completely ignored was this. It is an article which made me very angry for reasons which have been plastered all over the blogosphere so I scarcely need to repeat them. Except (yeah, OK, so maybe I do need to repeat one or two) that it seemed to me to suffer from the Brokeback Mountain problem.

I may be the only person in the Western World not to have liked Brokeback Mountain. And I'd agree it was well-acted, well-shot, well-written and well-directed. Jake Gyllenhaal's performance in particular was exquisite. But the intensity of misery was far too much for me. I thought that a lot of people would have come out of that movie thinking "oh, poor gay people, how horrible life is for them, I really do feel sorry for them." Which is of course patronising, not to mention grossly inaccurate.

Of course, Brokeback was a piece of fiction - it couldn't be expected to "represent both sides" by showing some happy gay men having a great time. That would have been leaden and dreadful. But that Guardian article is a piece of journalism not fiction. It could have thought around the issues. It might have demonstrated insight and thougtfulness. But instead it said, essentially "oh, poor fat people, how horrible life is for them."

Does this journalist not know any fat people? Doesn't she have any fat friends, or colleagues, or relatives? (Perhaps she doesn't. Perhaps she should write about why that is.) Doesn't she have anyone to tell her that fat people often have fun, exciting, interesting lives? Some of us even win literary awards, you know.

"He'll only spend it on drink"

Spent an inordinate amount of time on the tube today staring at a poster for the Killing with Kindness campaign. The general idea is to persuade people not to give money to the homeless, because "you may be helping them buy drugs that could kill them", but instead give the money to charities which work with the homeless. I don't know what I think about this. On one hand, I can see the point. Firstly, homelessness charities do amazing work and deserve to receive large quantities of our money. Secondly, homeless people are often in such a state of emotional distress that giving them money might be like putting a bottle into the hand of an alcoholic friend who's just broken up with his girlfriend and lost his job. It might be what he wants, but he's in no state to judge.

On the other hand. Well. For one thing it seems to me an encouragement to inhumanity. Living in a big city like London, it's all too easy to start ignoring other people's requests for help, to shut down and stop seeing the dirty, bundled-up people begging at Tube stations as people at all. And yes, it would be better if we were as open with one another as children and if, seeing someone in pain, we were to kneel down and talk to them, ask them about their lives and how we could help. But most of us are too afraid, so the exchange of a pound coin or two stands in for it. It's a way of saying: I see you, I know you're there. This is more about the soul of the giver than the receiver. Who are we if, when we see someone asking us for something we could easily provide, we always walk on?

And the other thing is how patronising this campaign seems to me. I understand, I really do, that the people who made it are trying to do good, and certainly do more good on a daily basis than I manage in about 10 years. But maybe it's for this reason that they might not understand how easily the campaign fits in with most people's prejudices about the homeless. That middle England statement "don't give him money. He'll only spend it on drink." Honestly, if you gave me money, I might spend it on sweeties, alcohol, Playstation games and other things that probably aren't good for me and of which you might not approve. We all do things that are bad for us. I very much doubt that not giving homeless people money will stop them from taking drugs - and I believe it's just possible that there are other ways to get that money which we might find even more unpalatable. As far as I can see, this campaign will probably reinforce the impression many people have that the homeless are scum, that they deserve to be looked down on, that they have no control over their actions and are therefore both stupid and dangerous. But maybe I'm wrong. I hope so.

Something which certainly does not reinforce prejudice about the homeless is Alexander Masters' brilliant book Stuart: a life backwards. I've been meaning to mention it here for weeks because it's the best thing I've read this year, it's intelligent and funny, moving and wise and full of opinion-altering insight. Despite being about the life of a homeless man, it is strangely not depressing at all, but simply clear sighted. This is a book that ought to be on school reading-lists and handed out for free to commuters. Perhaps it could be serialised on tube posters too, to counteract the unpleasant aftertaste of Killing with Kindness.