Oh woe is me.

I have got a cold. Oh, I am so not well I am writing this from my bed even thought it is a lovely day and I could be doing things in the garden and buying Christmas cards and sending said cards, and it is all because of my nose. My head is fine but not at all sensible. Yesterday in London I kept initiating conversations with complete strangers about their backpacks and their travel plans, or their country of origins (Romanians are begging in hordes in London, just as we had been warned before they joined the EU) or admiring their babies. I had a lovely time with my friend Sarah and fended off the cold with Strepsils and alcohol - a sherry in Gordon's wine bar, a mulled wine on the South Bank and when I got home, another glass of red because it was Friday.

Today I was meant to go to London with Amanda to sing carols and I just couldn't. It's a real shame. Every one has to keep well away from me. They have to keep well, away from me.

Talk on search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence with Prof Brian Cox and Dr Adam Rutherford and film, Contact, at BFI

I do love our jaunts to the South Bank. I feel like going to lots of literary / cultural history things, but I rarely do, I like to see my literary heroes but I also like to expand my knowledge of what is going on in the world.

Adam Rutherford

Prof Cox didn't seem too lively last night, he said he had recently come back from Australia and his body didn't know what time it was; from my seat near the front clearly he was tired and longing to be at home on the sofa with the kids and the blooming missus. But Dr Rutherford is jolly super! He is a natural -born leader to whom orchestrating a large audience of questioners is a simple joy. He speaks easily and confidently and one judges his brain to be on tip-top form.  He kicked the conversation along and tried to prod old Coxy into wakefulness, and Coxy did his best. Sometimes Brian Cox is best when he is a bit acerbic, as he is with conspiracy theorists. He just cuts them short. I had already heard him say (on Monkey Cage which I have on my iPod) that he thinks intelligent life like us is incredibly rare, even though they have now found 2,000 planets in our galaxy which look good for supporting life, and he said that again, also tried to explain wormholes, and the fact that gravity doesn't exist.

40 years ago we sent a transmission into space, which is called the Arecibo message. Arecibo is in Puerto Rico (very beautiful trees) where the big radio telescope is. Cox and Rutherford explained the origin of the message and what it means.  It sounds a well thought-out message but we only transmitted it for 3 minutes!!

the Arecibo message

They both loved the film they introduced - Contact - with Jodie Foster playing a scientist they both approved of: single-minded, brave, fighting like a lion for funding, being done down by a senior man who wants all the glory after she's done all the work. She is obsessed with listening for a message from space. Other scientists think she's crazy, but the film is called Contact, and the scene where she at last hears something (loud!!!) is very exciting. It's directed by Zemeckis (Forest Gump) who is particularly strong on special effects and it is based on a book by Carl Sagan. Brian Cox seems to have been greatly impressed by Carl Sagan but the counter view seems to be that Carl Sagan was messiahnistic (OK that's not a word, is it?)

The film was 2.5 hours long and I was really uncomfortable in my seat too close to the front and way off to the side (it was cheap) but I was gripped the whole way through. Jodie Foster played a blinder and one felt for her so much.  I recommend this film as a story and a spectacle. I don't feel as though I am now convinced that there is intelligent life elsewhere but it did give me a glimpse into what scientists dream of. They dream of aliens who give them difficult puzzles to solve and behave like father-figures. In spite of the billions of people on our planet they feel lonely and think that there is an answer "out there". 

However, the film does point up the parallels between those who have faith in a God that no one can see or prove the existence of, and those who experience other phenomena ... but I don't want to give the plot away. See the movie !! Recommended by scientists!

Here is a lecture on genetics by Adam Rutherford.

Being a Man - Grayson Perry

Grayson talked to us dressed as his alter ego, Clare. It seems to be his public persona. Clare is a little girl in strap shoes, short socks and a lovely flowery dress, all petticoats, and a big lace collar. But Clare is also a powerful figure: larger than life. She takes the stage, she walks up and down it to talk to us and to show off, and she enjoys herself. She makes us laugh. Is the laughter partly a result of being made uneasy - the collision of opposite sexualities?

I can't remember anything Grayson said, apart from his map of the male brain, which put self-righteousness right at the front and was backed by an area called baloney, which is called upon when a man needs to justify himself. Very funny. He talked about men with beards and men who can mend things and men with sheds but I can't remember what his point was! Was is just to amuse? He thought that it's good for men to open up and talk about the deep stuff that affects them - he told us about his experiences of group therapy in which everyone cried every week - and he felt that was liberating. It worked for him.

He also told us that he was an alpha male and that he is very competitive on a bicycle. He has obviously done loads of cycling, and in races, he gloats as he overtakes.

But his competitiveness extends into his cross-dressing. He is proud to be the most famous tranny in the country, and he out-feminines all the women around him. He makes real women look drab and a bit lacking in effort. This is interesting. I am a cords and jumpers woman. I wear a kind of Barber jacket (not a real one, an M&S effort). I have no sexual persona. But I envy Grayson his lacy skirts. I do like lacy skirts. Somehow, it's more OK for him to wear them than for me to wear them, at our age. For him, it's a big camp show he can put on, but for me it's a one-way trip to ridicule. I think that for Grayson his cross-dressing is art : he denied this in the Reith lectures but it's obvious to me. He is making lovely tapestries now. You can see some on the web. The colours are gorgeous.

From the Guardian reviewer, who went to a few different events at the BAM festival:

Still, it's early days; given the demand for tickets, Kelly has already committed to BAM being an annual event, perhaps even the start of a movement. All movements need a manifesto, and it took Grayson Perry in one of his Bo-Peepiest pink party dresses to provide one. Few men have done as much original thinking about what it means to be male as the transvestite potter, champion cyclist, therapy survivor, Turner prizewinner, devoted husband and father.

Grayson insisted that all we believed about men could be unbelieved – men can, despite the propaganda, multitask ("I never go upstairs without carrying something") – and they can prevail in the constant battle with testosterone and keep it in their pants (frilly or otherwise), if they put their minds to it.

He ended with a scribbled series of demands. "We men ask ourselves and each other for the following: the right to be vulnerable, to be uncertain, to be wrong, to be intuitive, the right not to know, to be flexible and not to be ashamed." He insisted that men sit down to achieve them. He received, deservedly, a standing ovation.

Barbara Kingsolver - a biologist writes

The other night I went with Roz to the Southbank, where I have not ventured for some time, due to my difficult job eating up my life, and we ate in the British Film Institute, had some wine and saw Barbara Kingsolver, all of which cheered me up a lot.

BK is so gifted. I won't go through all the books she has written but the most famous is called The Poisonwood Bible, which everyone should read as it asks some very important questions about an extreme clash of cultures, which in this case is placed in the Congo. She wrote this book having actually lived in Africa as a child. Unlike most people, she has first hand experience to share. It's a very disturbing novel and I have not yet fathomed out its implications.

She said that she writes only about places she has been to and experienced. At present, I am reading one of her books, The Lacuna, which is set largely in Mexico, so she has been there, but not in the 1930's, which is when the action is taking place. Never mind, she has entered into the mind of the probably unreliable narrator (a gay man) and created a world for us where Lev Trotsky, exiled and in danger of assassination, with his wife and staff, goes to live with the artists Diego Rivera and Frieda Kahlo. 

The latest book, Flight Behaviour, from which she read, is set in her familiar Kentucky hills and is about love and growth (of course), monarch butterflies and climate change, which is the truth Barbara is commissioned to share. The life cycle of the monarch butterfly is a miraculous thing and the fragility of something beautiful and extraordinary is a perfect example of her message. She is a biologist with a load of qualifications and has some splendid academic colleagues, who, she told us, have read her work for scientific credibility and given it the thumbs up. 

She seems like a very happy person, at home in her life and happy to be feted in London as well as many other cities, I suppose. It bothers me that there were few men in the audience. It was almost 100% women. It is bad that half of a cosmopolitan population is not clued up about  work that is significant thematically, and not just to women. Most of her books are for either sex, but I am not sure that Prodigal Summer would appeal to a man. It's too much like a female fantasy.