Inconsolable and uncompensated

The initial frisson of Westminster interning hasn’t quite work off yet. I still can’t quite suppress a big, foolish grin when I emerge from the tube and see Big Ben looming over Victoria Embankment. And the casework is still fascinating, and my inner geek does love hoofing through Hansard.

One case is nibbling at me, however. A woman - whose husband killed their daughter and then himself - applied for compensation, and was awarded £11,000, but this wasn’t near enough to cover her counselling bills and the fact that she has been unable to function ever since. For a while I’ve been trying to find some way to up her award or seek financial support elsewhere, but I can’t find anything.

Mostly, this is because her husband killed himself. Had someone else killed her family, she would be awarded over £20,000. Because a member of her family killed her family, she’s awarded half as much. I’m not sure whether either your family self-destructing is worse than someone else destroying it, but I’m sure it’s at least equivalent. Neither am I sure who decides whether any of these equivalences would be financial as well as moral. But I’m fairly sure the Criminal Injuries Compensation Authority haven’t considered this properly.

Environmental baubles

LiveEarth, in all its Germanic compound-word glory, descended on six unfortunate corners of the world today. As Madonna declared, surrounded by thirty unusually white and attractive schoolkids, “Tonight is not about entertainment.” She wasn’t wrong.

The splendidly pointless switching-off of “all non-essential lighting” in Wembley did offer the chance for us to check that the splendid halo of light on the southern horizon from our top bedroom is indeed the Wembley arch. They didn’t switch off everything, though - presumably an outbreak of stadium-based criminality comparable only to the New Orleans Superdome wouldn’t quite embody societal unity.

Surviving Southall

Sidestepping the occasional crack-smoker and stumbling across a SWAT team preparing to storm a house, t’other intern Alan and I valiantly canvassed our way across the residential wastes of Southall today.

Despite some grim estates, Southall boasts the colour and individuality of the Punjabi presence of Sikhs and Muslims, who make up over half the population of the borough. The High Street is refreshingly empty of chain stores, peppered instead with a variety of ethnic emporia and a ripe array of fresh fruit and veg stalls.

With the by-election looming only 13 days away, Southall is suffering columns of lilywhite LibDem interns and an ominously hectoring Tory radiocar. Blues and Yellows both claim they’re the only party challenging Labour. In fact, it seems the Tories’ local entrepreneur Tony Lit is striding into 2nd, behind Labour’s 10,000+ majority. Ming’s merry men may get squished.

I admit it - the Westminster end of politics is definitely more to my taste. Quel snob.

Unbecoming Jane

Despite the ridiculously cold weather (which had earlier turned my attempt at an army-style sprint into a minor respiratory condition), the mad Irishwoman and I ventured out to see ‘Becoming Jane’, a new and thoroughly fictitious account of Jane Austen’s early romantic dalliances. This was at the Irishwoman’s behest; I was prepared to put aside my doubts and embrace it, she to put aside her hopes and detest it. As it turned out, my preparation was in vain – hers was not. ‘Becoming Jane’ was a dreary, cringemaking, earnest pastiche of frilly costume drama.

Perhaps if you’d shied away from costume drama in the past, you might find this charming. If you have, like most of its target audience, grown up on a diet of Mr Darcy wading out of sunspeckled lakes or Lucy Honeychurch’s mild feistiness dissolving into gooey romance, the charm feels a little resucitated. Jane and her sweetheart engage in some weak verbal sparring whilst mincing through a country dance at a society gathering; the romance begins with an awkward, unexpected encounter in the delightful English countryside; a wicked old matriarch seeks to thwart our heroine’s one chance at true happiness; the vicar is a bumbling eejit.

If you just looked at the cast list, you’d be filled with a vain hope. Admittedly, I had a continuous urge to smack Anne Hathaway’s trembling jaw, but most people find her beguiling. As the rakish Lefroy, James McAvoy, who shone in ‘The Last King of Scotland’, exudes charisma and energy, but a flat, witless script denies him (or anyone else) any good lines. A tripod of costume-friendly luvvies – Maggie Smith, James Cromwell and Julie Walters – try to prop it all up by doing their usual admirable turns. Not even the direction inspires. Like McAvoy, the unknown Julian Jarrold has an impressive TV resume, but unlike McAvoy, he fails to transfer his magic touch to celluloid. If you have a weak script, at least make your film pretty. Merely inserting Miss Hathaway isn’t going to do that.

Clearly, then, I was finding it all rather laughable by the time we’d approached the finale, in which an elderly Lefroy introduces his eldest daughter to the spinster Austen as “Jane” (isn’t that slightly creepy?). Worse, the film makers decided to inform us all that “In her short life, Jane Austen produced five of the greatest novels in the English language”. If I wasn’t so fond of the word ‘quibble’, I would be employing something far stronger and frankly obscene with which to refute this claim. Especially if one of those is supposed to be ‘Northanger Abbey’. McAvoy is not to be missed, nor is the idea of a semi-fictional history a bad premise for a film. For proof of these two claims, invest your time and money in 'The Last King of Scotland', not 'Becoming Jane'.