… that Michael Jackson deserved but didn’t get, as far as I know:

 http://www.thunderpie.net/2009/07/sad-funky-funeral-train-from-america.html

… I am now on full-time publicity duty. If you ever see the Times, Word, Q, Esquire, the Financial Times, the Sunday Telegraph or about a hundred other English-language publications, you will be able to read the attempts of a number of nice, patient journalists to get me to say something articulate and interesting, initially about ‘Juliet, Naked’ or ‘An Education’, and then, as desperation sets in, about anything at all.

This morning, however, there was a welcome reminder that there will be life after this. One of the current side-projects is an animated feature film entitled ‘The Babymakers’, set inside the human body. As with everything else in the world of cinema, there is only the remotest possibility of this ever happening. But at the moment my occasional co-writer Giles Smith and I are working with Airside Studios and Fred Deakin (of Lemon Jelly fame) on a three or four minute sample of the finished work, something called an animatic. This morning we recorded the script with Mark Williams, David Thewlis, Morwenna Banks and our girl Carey Mulligan, and it was fun – more fun, unfortunately, than interviews. There will be fun again.

While looking for change in my jacket pocket, I pull out a piece of paper which, to my consternation, reads as follows:

WARNING: NOT EVERYONE IS SUITED TO HAVING AN AFFAIR. THEY (sic) ARE NOT AN ALTERNATIVE TO WORKING ON OR ENDING A MARRIAGE. AFFAIRS CAN DAMAGE A GOOD MARRIAGE. ALWAYS CONSIDER OTHER PEOPLE AND IF YOU ARE GOING TO HAVE AN AFFAIR, PLEASE SELECT YOUR PARTNER WISELY.

Underneath this psychic health warning was the address of a website which, presumably, will help to undercut much of the above advice, just as cigarettes undercut the health warnings on the packets. I turned the piece of paper over and found that I was actually holding a simple London taxi receipt. Blimey.

Anyway. All helpful, if somewhat muddled, advice. Is an affair really not an alternative to working on a marriage? You’d have thought it was one or the other, really. The genius who wrote this is right, though: having an affair may well turn out to be the same thing as ending a marriage. I’m sure we can all agree that affairs can damage good marriages, although I’d like to fly the red flag for bad ones, too – in fact the effect of an affair on a marriage with underlying health issues, to use the current phraseology, could be fatal. The last sentence is just solid and valuable common sense.
We’ve all seen Fatal Attraction.

This afternoon, during a shoot with a photographer from the Times, I met four English fans of a Japanese rock band called D’Espairspray. (I may have positioned the apostrophe wrongly.) They were on the pavement outside the Garage, a club on Highbury Corner, waiting for the band to play a gig. But here’s the thing: they had something like thirty hours to kill before their heroes took to the stage. Were these teenage girls worried about the gig selling out? No, they weren’t. They already had their tickets. They also had queue tickets, numbered one to four, proving that they had arrived before everyone else. And they also admitted that D’Espairspray probably wouldn’t sell out the venue anyway, which isn’t one of London’s biggest; in other words, even if they turned up thirty minutes before the gig, it would be impossible to end up more than fifty feet away from the band. These girls, however, wanted to ensure that they were leaning on the barriers at the foot of the stage, and this need to be as close as they could get meant an afternoon, a night and a day on Holloway Road. However much you feel you understand the mindset of the obsessed fan, someone will always come along to prove you know nothing.

The US trailer for ‘An Education’ is now all over the internet – for example here, with the US  poster: http://weblogs.variety.com/thompsononhollywood/2009/07/trailer-watch-an-education.html

We ignore the stuff about  major awards, obviously.