This is me celebrating Stewart's award in cinematography last Saturday night at the Epworth Hospital.

What does a writer need? According to Virginia Woolf, it's a room of your own. I would add that probably the use of one's writing arm should also be condideration.

On Saturday night, Stewart Thorn, who shot our short film, won a cinematography award from the Australian Cinematographers Society for his work on another short film, Hollow Bones (directed by Nicholas Verso and produced by Rita Walsh). See it all in lights here. To say that I was a little bit pleased and proud of this would be an understatement. But in retrospect I could have expressed my pride a little more eloquently than by falling over and breaking my wrist.

Yes, I fell over on a slippery floor and snapped my wrist. My writing wrist. I am learning to type one-handed, and the frisbee won't be coming out for at least six weeks, but possibly the worst thing is that I have to bathe wearing a plastic bag. Also, it's kind of cruel that the film that I was celebrating was called Hollow Bones. Do you think someone is telling me something?

Congratulations to Stew and Nick and Rits. Very, very proud. Obviously.

Today, in my Day Job, I was asked to tell the people printing my business cards what I would like my title to be. My title. On my business card. Under my name. I was asked to tell them what I would "like" my title to be. Over the phone.

I was thinking, I could say anything, and they would print maybe five hundred or a thousand business cards reading "bad dancer" or "poo liason officer" or "Madam Lady President" or whatever and I could claim that it was a bad phone line, right?

Meanwhile, I haven't made it to the Melbourne Festival again because working for someone else requires, you know, working until you're exhausted and want to go home and watch episodes of things Aaron Sorkin wrote and that you wish you could have the time to write but you can't because you're watching Aaron Sorkin.

The weekend of a writer who should really be at home finishing a script goes a little something like this:

Friday night - go to George Orwell's 1984 at the Melbourne International Arts Festival. This is one of those things I never would have thought of myself, but Rita thinks of most things for me and this was a present from her. The adaptation, by Michael Gene Sullivan is quite brilliant. It was directed by Tim Robbins and performed by The Actors' Gang. That's a pretty impressive line-up, just quietly.

The reason I say I wouldn't necessarily have seen the play myself is that 1984 is about the role of the powerful in society. It's extremely clever, but once you've read it, you get it, right?

But this play makes your head explode because it's clearly about today's society. It's about terrorism and Guantanamo Bay and people in power lying about wars, and it's about the economy working only when there are lots of poor and uneducated people. There's a torture scene that, even though the play was in the State Theatre and it was the opposite of claustrophobic in there, you really just wanted to leave. Some people did. So, quite a brilliant Friday night thanks to the always thoughtful Rita. My only quibble would be that they needed microphones (even just a central overhead mic would have been helpful). Everytime someone coughed, I wanted to clock them over the head.

Saturday, I went shopping. I hate shopping more than I hate the two major political parties in this country, and more than brussels sprouts. I had to recruit my friend Claire, who found me an entire new wardrobe within an hour and a half.

Saturday night, well as I've said somewhere here before, everyone in commercial radio gets stuff for free. I got a call from my mates in radio who had lined themselves up with a four course meal and unlimited booze for an entire evening because a restaurant was opening in East Melbourne. It was an increasingly hilarious evening and it took me an embarrassingly long time to recover on Sunday.

Sunday night, went and saw Little Miss Sunshine, a ridiculously farcical but funny and sweet film which was perfectly cast, very well performed, and which features many frankly alarming scenes shot in a real life beauty pagent for teensy tiny little girls tarted up to look like nineteen-eighties hookers. The film is very much a case of "what could possibly go wrong next in this hilarious dysfunctional family", but the characters are actually cleverer than that, and anyway, it's a fun ride, so shut up.

But the writing? Didn't get to the writing. Thinking I might get onto that now. Right after this cup of tea.

Last night I went to the Shed Warming at the Arts Festival, where I had a few drinks and decided I liked Kristy Edmunds, if only because of the Artist Card policy, which encourages artists to come to the festival at a slightly discounted price. This is obviously a good idea for the festival, because artists are going to want to go to the festival and they're not necessarily going to be able to afford it. So make them go to more stuff, make them bring more friends, and there's your (satisfied) audience.

Which brings me to the question of how come rich people get stuff for free?

I've never understood why people with money get invited to stuff for free and that's supposed to make the rest of us want to go. When I worked in radio, I got everything for free. Movies, CDs, concert tickets. Now that I have a wonky income? I pay full price for everything. I know it's about power and influence and fame and so on, but are they serious? They seriously think that if they can get, say, John Travolta to turn up for five minutes before the opening night screening of Swordfish, that's going to make anyone in that audience tell their friends to go and see the worst movie of 2001 all because John Travolta turned up, looked embarrassed, and then got on a plane to L.A? I'll tell you what they're going to do. They're going to do what Stitzy and I did, which is hang out eating the free food and drinking the booze and saying how turd the movie was.

People aren't stupid. It even works the other way. Bad marketing can't stop something genuinely good from working. Look at Kenny, the Australian comedy feature (and haven't we learned to love those words) released several months ago. I personally think that the marketing concepts for Kenny were terrible. I mean, it got a lot of pre-publicity, and the website is slick and everything, but they were marketing the wrong thing. Anyone with a healthy fear of dumb-Aussie-bloke-orientated films (and I don't think I'm on my own here) was not going to be enraptured by a poster featuring a dim-looking chap with a dunny brush surrounded by toilet paper.

But Kenny is a gorgeous film. It's not really about poo, or dumb blokes, or loveable idiots with hearts of gold. It's not even about comedy, really. You never once feel like you're being fed a gag, you're just getting to know a character. So what made me go from heart-sinking disappointment at the sight of the poster, to paying good money to see the film?

Two things: word of mouth, and Kenny. I was watching TV at gym one time and Kenny came on. Completely ad libbing in some mindless TV interview, it was hardly the environment in which anyone can shine. But shine he did, and I had to slow down the treadmill while I watched him sensitively describing the flushing mechanism on a toilet.

So, look, my point is, audiences are going to work it out. Kenny shouldn't have been marketed like that. I still know women who won't see it because "it looks terrible" or they're not interested in "toilet humour", and I think that's bad because women are actually who a lot of it is aimed at. So they got it wrong. But after two weeks, everyone had two friends telling them they had to see this new Aussie film called Kenny.

So dear distributors and production companies, please stop giving free tickets to people who never pay for anything anyway and who own three houses and two boats. Give the free tickets to the people who can't afford them and watch your audiences grow with the good films and sink with the lousy ones. It's really not that complicated.

I know, I know. I should really be running the country.

By the way, if you're going to see Kenny, here's some advice: see it in a HUGE cinema. Think of the biggest cinema you've been to and see it there. Do NOT see it in a teensy weensy cinema where the hand-held camera is so bad that several of you have to leave the movie and go outside and spew. There is a sign up at the Nova in Carlton warning people prone to motion sickness to sit up the back. Sit as far back as Fitzroy North would be my advice.

I have a sore frisbee arm.

Hurrah!

Best feeling in the world is the particular kind of exhausted you feel after chucking a frisbee at the beach for an hour and only stopping because it's dark and you left your glow-in-the-dark frisbee at home.

Now, of course, I am back to reality.

On a serious note... this weekend, Anna Politkovskaya, a Russian journalist who criticised her government and reported bravely on matters such as the war in Chechnya and the Beslan school disaster (on the way to which she was poisoned) was gunned down in the lift outside her apartment. She spoke at the Sydney Writers' Festival earlier this year (I didn't see her speak). Here are some of the other journalists who have been murdered in Russia in recent years, and these two journalists, from one of my favourite international radio stations, were killed in their tent this weekend as well. They had been researching for a documentary. All of this makes 2006 the most deadly year for journalists on record, apparently. Previously, 2005 was the most deadly year on record, and before that, it was 2004.

So when I talk about how crap Australian journalism is, it's not because I don't respect journalists. It's because I do. People are risking their lives because they recognise that media is a very powerful tool, and they are being murdered because of it. And today's Melbourne Age online stories? Brad and Angelina have a bodyguard who punched someone, Princess Mary is coming to visit, the MCG is ready for a terrorist attack on the basis of a rumour in a British newspaper, and there's a story called Sex Behind the Engagement Ring, which is the most viewed article of the day, and which is actually just lifted from the Telegraph.

I would like to think that Australia, being a "free" country, has greater opportunity for investigative journalism. Perhaps not.

This morning, the checkout lady in Piedemontes looked at me and burst into tears.

Quite quickly, she went from speaking Italian to the woman in the queue in front of me, to looking at me and getting all choked up and apologising into a tissue.

Now I'm worried about her and I want to take her one of the seven dollar bunches of Piedemontes roses. What happened? Did I remind her of someone? She was sixty or something and her manager was a seventeen-year-old in a tie. Did he look a little bit smug? I couldn't quite tell.

This one goes out to the checkout lady...

Oh Piedes checkout lady
You spoke in different tongues
You were clever with the register
And very good with sums

You smiled at your customers
You didn't think you'd cry
And when you did I got a shock
And now I wonder why.

What was it that made you sad?
Somebody at work?
Was it some obnoxious little prick,
Some Piedemontes jerk?

You turned the little lightbox off
That says "Register Three"
You put the closed sign on the bench
And all because of me

I'm sorry that I made you cry
I hope you're feeling better
If you'd like some jerk to cop it
I can write a nasty letter

I think perhaps it isn't that
I think it's something bad
So I hope you feel less lonely
And I hope you feel less sad

And I hope you have a donut
(You can get them free upstairs)
And in the chocolate lolly aisle
You stock some nice eclairs

There's nothing good on telly
But have a bath, it's total heaven
Meanwhile I promise next time
I'll stick to register seven.

I went and saw the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra playing the other night with a young lad called Ben Folds. It really was quite something, and it made all of us want to go to the orchestra more often. Like, ever. There are some things I never do much, which I possibly should do more. These include:

- Attending orchestra productions

- Attending dance productions

- Reading books without interrupting self by purchasing more exciting book, which I then also don't finish on account of newly purchased and more exciting book

- Messing about in boats

I plan to add to this list. Lists of what I am inadequate at doing are always long and thick and rich with juicy goodness.

Carry on.