Sometimes working from home is great. You make yourself a coffee, you wear your PJs until you feel like it, you have access to whatever weird thing you think you might suddenly need (a quote from a favourite book, some notes you wrote for another script nine years ago that might provide a clue, a big furry jumper to put on over your PJs).

But...

The telemarketers call me at home. My telemarketers are very nice people from India, who are always deeply thrilled that I have won the special once in a lifetime chance to sign up for eight years with a mobile phone carrier I have never heard of.

However, when you get up from the middle of a writing reverie and you stumble across the room towards the telephone and hear that telltale gap before anyone speaks, you really don't appreciate the tone of voice that the telemarketers take when they ask, "Is that Mrs Clarke?"

I have told them on many occasions that Mrs Clarke is not my name. I am not married to a member of my family, or coincidentally married to another person called Clarke who also spells it with an "e" on the end. I have told them also that I do not wish to speak to them, that this is a work number, and that the police are tracing the call because they are illegally not telling me where they got my phone number from. (Naturally, this last one is not true but it does tend to scare them).

Most of you have hopefully already heard this brilliant telemarketing prank. If you haven't, please do yourself a favour and have a listen. It's possibly the only way to get a telemarketer to give out his address over the telephone.

Not all of us can manage that, though.

So here is my advice: sing.

Now, whenever the phone rings in the middle of the morning, as I walk towards it I think of a song I know the words to (Ben Folds, Ani Difranco, even a bit of "Did you Ever Know That You're My Hero") and when I hear the Indian telemarketer asking can he please speak to Mrs Clarke, I sing. Loudly. As out of tune as possible.

After maybe a couple of verses, or up to the point where I can't remember the lyrics, I stop and I hang up the phone. Listening to the reaction at the other end of the phone is especially fun. I'm hoping they have to tick some kind of box such as "CUSTOMER HUNG UP" or "CUSTOMER NOT HOME" or "CUSTOMER ABUSIVE". I am hoping they have to make a new box called "CUSTOMER APPEARS TO BE SINGING".

Anyone who gets the same calls, try it. We shall overcome.

Just as a precaution, if you see me in the street, here is the kind of question I am getting tired of:

"You lost your entire hard drive? What, everything? Don't you back your stuff up? I always back my stuff up. I back it up nine times a day in three different languages and keep copies in four different buildings across five continents and then I send it to myself in a time machine and store it in a vacuum pack in the future."

And, to save time, here is my answer:

NO I DID NOT BACK MY STUFF UP OKAY YOU SMUG PRICK? I WAS BUSY. I HAD THINGS TO DO. I WAS "PLANNING" TO BACK MY STUFF UP. I WAS UNDER INSTRUCTIONS FROM RITA TO BACK MY STUFF UP. I DID NOT BACK MY STUFF UP. AND YOU KNOW WHAT? I HAVEN'T DONATED BLOOD FOR MONTHS EITHER. AND SOMETIMES I SWEAR AND QUITE OFTEN I FORGET PEOPLE'S NAMES AND ONE TIME I PLAYED A TRICK ON MY SCIENCE TEACHER BECAUSE I KNEW SHE WAS DEAF IN ONE EAR. I AM IN IMPERFECT PERSON IN MANY WAYS. BUGGER OFF, FOR INSTANCE.

That is all.

(Except this. Anthony Lane on Zellweger. Oh yes).

So the Sydney Festival was... well, it was fun at first.

We saw a few things, including the brilliant Small Metal Objects, the staging of which takes place at a train station (Circular Quay) and which broke down so many of the squirm-worthy pretensions that form the backbone of most theatre I seem to go to. It was truly inspired. If you haven't seen it: the actors converse into the headphones of the audience, who watch the crowd until they locate the bodies that match the voices. So you're hearing a conversation and you're looking at the crowd of (real) people at the station who don't understand why there's an audience with headphones looking at them, and then suddenly you realise two of the people in the crowd are the people having the conversation into your headphones. This does brilliant things to the way you watch/are watched/watch other people being watched etc that really makes you think. Add to this the fact that some of the performers are intellectually disabled and suddenly there's another dimension to the people looking/being looked at/"what's going on here? You looking at me?" scenario that already exists in a crowd of people looking at each other.

It would have been interesting to see the show on a weekday, when people at train stations behave differently. I saw it on a weekend, when people were slow, and curious, and bored. Hence there was a man who danced for the audience (what are they looking at? he asked his friend and then gave us something to look at, in case that was what we were there for). There was a group of young boys who circled one of the actors in a way that could have turned out to be threatening, except that all of us were watching, so it didn't.

I know most sensible people have already seen Back to Back theatre performing this show before, when it was in Melbourne, but I hadn't seen it. I'd see it again though, before the troupe (originally from Geelong) takes it overseas and gets famous. I recommend.

Anyhoo, then we went to see a Beckett play, at NIDA. Tell you what, if you've got any spare cash, you should get it down to NIDA pronto. Tin shed, that joint. Smell of an oily rag. Check out the foyer for instance.

Beckett was wonderful. Here is a photograph of Barry McGovern, but only because I can't find an actual photograph of his voice. Gorgeous voice, gorgeous performance, beautiful words, and all in all it was a fantastic piece of theatre with all the artifice that so often forms the basis of the aforementioned pretensions, but with none of the pretensions. Here is a review.

Then, on Sunday, when I had planned to work on my play, my hard-drive died and all my writing was lost. My writing, my notes, all drafts of the comedy festival show since early December... all gone. Forever. Back to the theme of this post: drama, with no pretension.

Back up your files.

Since then, I have been reading about important things like the abduction of children, the meltdown of the planet, the David Hicks situation, and war. Comedy Festival scripts and writing collections are really not that important.

Still. Back up your files. Now.

There's a vigil today in the city, in Melbourne, to mark the fifth anniversary of Australian man David Hicks being detained without trial in Guantanamo Bay.

I know, I know. Heavy topic to start with, but sometimes I stop and think about stuff, and today this is what stopped me.

The Americans are taking a "hard line", suggesting that the five years Hicks has already spent in Guantanamo won't be taken into account in any sentencing.

Whether or not David Hicks is a dangerous terrorist, there aren't many people I can think of who have been detained without trial in secret conditions for secret reasons by the most powerful democracy in the world, at any point in history. Rapists, mass murderers, dictators such as Pinochet and Saddam... all subject to a legal system (whether we like it or not).

It strikes me as quite bizarre that a country where citizens demand adherance to a constitutionally entrenched right to carry a gun can't recognise that giving someone a "right" or a "freedom" can result in the system imploding (give someone a right to carry a gun, they shoot someone. Give someone a right to a fair trial, that person is freed in twenty years and offends again). But the alternative is that there is no system at all.

Watching the play of 1984 this year at the Arts Festival in Melbourne, I realised that the reason I found it so depressing was that reality doesn't survive the comparison.

Now, consider this: the two Melbourne newspapers have the same story as their homepage online at the moment. Colour photographs, gushing press: Kylie has been voted the second most famous person in Britain after the Queen. Voted. Most famous. Kylie. Queen.

Do we think The Age and The Herald Sun are being satirical? Are they subverting the dominant paradigm? Is this a really hilarious joke about perspective? Or is reality really that much more insane and surreal than art could ever hope to be? I'm going with the former.

I am going to the Sydney Festival this weekend. There are some fairly exciting cultural forces to be reckoned with up there this weekend, including Standing There Captain of Industry Melanie Mars Bar Howlett and a chap who goes by the name of Beckett (seems to have written a couple of plays).

Speaking of culture, did anyone watch that brilliant, brief, dirty adaptation of Macbeth on the ABC the other night? Some of my favourite British performers and some presumably very happy production designers were let loose on a script that has traditionally bored me, despite its obvious brilliance. The whole thing was set in a kitchen, leading to a brilliant combination of Jaime Oliver undertones and ready access to sharp knives. Can't wait to see if their Taming of the Shrew is going to be as good as Ten Things I Hate About You.

(This leads me to an obvservation I have made many times to housemates and long suffering friends: don't you think that the easiest way to tell where a TV show was made is to mute the sound and look at the lighting? Bright or soft warm = America. Dark and shadowy or blue and alarming = Britain, anywhere close to Britain. Stark yellow or flat and white = Summer Bay. It's the Asian ones that are hard to pick. Try it.)

Anyway, the writing's going well thanks.

Shut up.

It has now reached the stage where I have received a fake email from a friend of mine pretending to be Anthony Lane wanting to meet me for coffee.

People know about my weakness for the film pages of The New Yorker and they are starting to exploit me for it.

Very funny, people. You tease me now, but read this. If I'm going to fall in love with writing, I may as well fall in love with someone who uses the word "scumbled" as though it's the sort of thing people say at the breakfast table.

Meanwhile, I went to the physiotherapist today to check up on my (previously broken) wrist. She said it would be fine for work. No worries, she said. Writing and typing and working? Fine. Gym? Brilliant. Not a worry. Manual labour? Ace.

Frisbee? At least a month. Six weeks, maybe more. No frisbee. Ever. Scouts Honor.

Stupid dumb broken wrist. How is that fair?