noël coward i went to a marvelous party lyrics click here 

To release a bonus minipodcast with the authors I have conversations reading$some of their extracts have become a bit like that cherry that is delivered by the waiter a week later to your house. It comes late but it helps you reminisce that original moment. Sally Gardner is not only a gifted woman but a woman with a particular gift for gifts. A present from her is a serious matter because it is not thought for the person you think you are but who she thinks you could be. This, of course is not presented as a mandate but as a possibility. That is a rarity because for some mysterious reason my female friends deal with any aspect of my life with a problem solving approach and it is certainly not nice to be conceived all the time as a problem. So thinking about it that mysterious reason any need that appear from my part as requiring a solution  some mysterious reason, although that reasons seems not mysterious after a bit of thought. Sometimes we choose our friends to hurt ourselves in the name of love and that is what internalised homophobia is all about. So the queerness in the rather heterosexual Sally Gardner, proud mother of three is that she does not use the gay friend as another potential territory to assert her patriarchal duties but instead listens so when I asked her to chose a poem for me she timely chose Noel Cowards’ I went to a marvelous party whose rendition, i mean Sally’s is proof of the polymath that she is because the inflections of the acting are superb and i must say, I prefer to Cowards Ubercamp version. Not quite Ken Loach-like or as Ken Loach as the daugher of a judge can go, her naturalistic bordering on realist undertone is something to be observed. But as I say Sally Gardner is about gifts and her books are full of those. Linked to what I was saying about the natural patriarchal drive of women who throught culture and even architecture they are domesticated to do the dirty work of patriarchy. So what a girl needs is not a heroine which confirms the structure of patriarchal domination but a thinking character like Coriander, that is the main character of I, Coriander, a girl with powers in Restauration England but most importantly a girl that does not follow fads not gets infatuated by exotic promises but instead prioritises self knowledge and elastic time. After Coward’s poem that she declaimesdfor my birthday, there is an extract of I, Coriander read by Juliet Stevenson. I want to also take a second to thank the incredibly talented and succesful Lucas Marti who gave us the music that opens and closes this podcast.