Who said ordinary people can't change the world?

Location 6pm. In bed with confused cats (too early) | Mood Thrilled | Date 29 May 2006
Filed in:
Author (full name): 
Franny Armstrong
Location: 
6pm. In bed with confused cats (too early)
Mood: 
Thrilled
Soundtrack: 
Pirate radio big shout out, boom chukka boom chukka chukka
Ailments: 
Ears still ringing from jet cars
Date: 
29 May 2006
Current silver lining: 
Renewed faith in media changing the world

Official Day Off today. After a panicky start in the morning - what to do? - hooked up with old pal/new celebrity Eric Schlosser, author of Fast Food Nation, who's in town to launch his new kids' junk-food book. Helen and Dave McLibel came along too.

We all met ten years ago when H&D were broke and struggling with the court case, ditto me with my McLibel film and Eric with his original Rolling Stones articles which led to his book. All doing our stuff for the first time, not knowing what we were doing, not thinking for a second that we would have any actual affect on McDonald's, but believing we were onto something.

So for us to be sitting together, ten years later, with laws changed, McDonald's on the backfoot and Eric just back from the goddamn Cannes premiere of the goddamn Hollywood movie of his book starring goddamn Bruce Willis and Ethan Hawke...

Who said ordinary people can't change the world?

But there's a price to pay. Eric is looking pale and drawn and nervy and clearly under immense pressure, what with the US food industry making enormously glossy anti-Eric websites (he once wrote about cannabis! don't believe a word he says! trust us instead!) and apparently paying children to disrupt his book reading sessions. Hell, Michael Moore now has to have full-time bodyguards. And Ken Loach has been getting it in the neck after he won the Palme D'or last week for his Northern Ireland film, "The Wind That Shakes The Barley". Journalists who haven't seen it are calling him a Nazi in the national press for using British Council film money to depict the British government's well-documented actions. Only the truth can provoke such reactions, methinks.

Eric reassured me with the thought that the food industry are pansies compared to another industry with 20 times the resources and 1000 times the wealth...

All in all, an inspiring comrades-in-arms, preparing-to-go-over-the-top kind of day off. Only downside was the realisation that Eric knows very little about climate change - if brainy blokes like him haven't grasped it, what hope for the mainstream? Or is it just because he's American and the media isn't as on-the-case as here?

Bumped into Composer Alf on his handpainted pink bike as I cycled home along our new cycle path (small progress). He's asked his brother - who happens to be Assistant Conductor of Daniel Barenboim's East West Divan orchestra - whether they'll record Crude's orchestral score... and they will. Probably. For free. Maybe. How extremely cool to have the world's most political orchestra (as in it's an Israeli/Palestinian joint effort) on our film - don't think we'll mention that it just happens to be the only one we have a direct connection to.

No we don't. I forgot Piers said his cousin or someone is the conductor of the BBC Symphony. So that's two. Anyone wanna borrow our spare?