Tickets for a very special event to raise funds for TreeHouse are now on sale at www.ticketweb.co.uk. The Ambition Gig will feature a full set by the brilliant Ladyhawke and her band, followed by a special DJ set by the legendary Mark Ronson, at KOKO on Thursday June 4th. See you there, I hope.
…British film in competition at this year’s Cannes Film Festival is “Love You More”, a short film directed by the artist Sam Taylor-Wood, and adapted by Patrick Marber from the very sexually explicit story he wrote for “Speaking With The Angel”. We at TreeHouse (the school received all profits from the book) are very proud.
I received two complaints about “Speaking With The Angel”, and the writers of both letters were unhappiest about “Love You More” and Irvine Welsh’s story. One of these outraged people wanted his money back. “Am I really that out of touch?” he asked plaintively. I told him that he was, and refused to give him his money back on the not unreasonable grounds that he’d clearly already read the book. He then wrote back again, saying that he would send TreeHouse their portion of the cover price if I would send him back the rest. At this point, I’m afraid, I decided that the correspondence was over.
Anyway, I am now going to ask Penguin to produce a movie tie-in edition of Patrick’s nine-page story, with a suitably shocking cover. It’s all in a good cause.
The Arsenal v Chelsea game on Sunday was a strange experience. The game was dedicated to TreeHouse: the players gave up a day’s pay for the charity, and wore special “Be A Gooner, Be A Giver” T-shirts to warm up in, and there was an enormous amount of publicity about the charity in the build-up to the game, so for those of us directly involved in TreeHouse, it was all enormously moving and incredibly exciting. And then the referee blew his whistle, and most of the twenty-two players on the pitch tried to kill each other for the next hour and a half. Terry tried to hurt Fabregas, Eboue broke Terry’s foot, Joe Cole damaged Eboue’s ligaments, and the crowd gave the former Arsenal player Ashley Cole a torrid (to quote the great Paul Merson) whenever he touched the ball. There was very little charity visible anywhere, and the game left a nasty taste in the mouth. Still, eh? Three points for Arsenal, and more than a hundred and thirty thousand pounds for TreeHouse.
You can watch the film that the advertising agency CHI made for the ‘Be A Gooner….’ campaign here:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=2HGLDFET7ZA
And you can read a piece I wrote for the Times about TreeHouse here:
www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/times_appeal/article2962661.ece
And if you feel compelled to give anything to this wonderful school, you can go here:
