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Bill Murray: Do not disrespect the oddball

10/15/2009

You don’t meet Bill Murray. You spend some time in his presence, and then try to figure him out when he’s gone. For the 59-year-old screen legend, star of Ghostbusters, Groundhog Day and Lost in Translation, is a man of many faces, all of which inevitably return to that famous default deadpan of hangdog eyes, flaccid cheeks and slightly protruding lower lip.

Right now, for instance, in a wildly ornate London hotel suite, and dressed down in crumpled black shirt and grey trousers, he has slipped into Zen Master mode. “People can say what they want about civilisation, but really we are all animals,” he muses, beginning a lecture on the bestial heart of man that is inspired by his new movie, Fantastic Mr. Fox, but encompasses all human spirituality and his personal desire to be available, present and honest in his own life. “Which is basically not the situation for me most of the time!” he jokes.

He plops back into movie star mode and speaks fondly of Fantastic Mr Fox, a beguiling stop-frame animated adaptation of Roald Dahl’s classic that is directed by Wes Anderson and stars George Clooney as the eponymous poultry-pilfering hero and Murray as his friend and lawyer, Badger. He calls the movie “charming” and says that it’s really a film about freedom, but he pearl jewelry talks mostly about his relationship with 40-year-old Anderson, who first directed Murray in 1998’s Rushmore. “We’ve done five films together now and we look out for each other,” he says. “There is a great sense of trust and loyalty between us.”

Of other directors, though, he is not so enamoured. Terminator Salvation’s McG (aka Joseph McGinty Nichol), for one, who directed Murray in Charlie’s Angels, recently claimed that Murray headbutted him on the Angels’ set during a creative dispute. “That’s bulls***! That’s complete crap!” says Murray, flushing slightly yet maintaining composure. “I don’t know why he made that story up. He has a very active imagination.” He pauses. The subject seems closed, but then a minor eruption. “No! He deserves to die,” he says, coldly staring, without breaking deadpan. “He should be pierced with a lance, not headbutted.”

On screen, strangely, Murray is like this too. The threat of sudden emotional violence is always lurking within. In his early movies, such as Meatballs and Caddyshack, he made this his shtick — witness his famously manic “It just doesn’t matter!” speech from the former movie, or the bursts of gopher-hatred in the latter. In later work, such as Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums, though the performances are more restrained the threat is still there, simmering behind the impassive glare. Think of how he gleefully destroys schoolboy Jason Schwartzman’s bicycle in Rushmore, or how he humiliates Robert De Niro’s tremulous cop in the opening of Mad Dog and Glory with a genuinely terrifying stare and the viciously spat, “F*** off!”

Off camera Murray can seem intimidating and an entire genus of movie gossip has sprung up around his supposedly cruel behaviour on pearl jewelry wholesale sets. Indeed, at a press conference for The Life Aquatic he was called a “bastard” by a former cameraman, who didn’t appreciate Murray’s on-set methods. While his spat with Lucy Liu on Charlie’s Angels has become part of Hollywood lore (he, allegedly, told her that she couldn't act, while she, in return, allegedly, threw punches). “Look, I will dismiss you completely if you are unprofessional and working with me,” he says, defending a working practice that he admits is strict. “When our relationship is professional, and you’re not getting that done, forget it.”

He is, of course, enigmatic too and lives completely off the Hollywood grid. He has no agent or publicist and is contactable only through friends or a freephone answering service. It took Sophia Coppola, for example, seven months to track him down for Lost in Translation. He giggles at the thought and confesses that he gets insane messages on the answering service. Producers reading out entire scripts. Agents begging for work. “Endless crazy stuff.” He adds that “eliminating the agents probably saved me money, but mostly it stopped the irritation of just the endless phone calls and gibberish.”

Nonetheless, despite all this, and perhaps because of it, Murray is universally venerated as a screen demigod. He is worshipped by an entire generation of hipster directors, including Anderson, Coppola and Jim Jarmusch, who see in his features the deliciously modern combination of ironic distance and flat-out heartbreak.

Similarly, the normally suave George Clooney was reduced to a stuttering wreck when he first met Murray at the 2004 Venice Film Festival (“He’s the best comic actor in the world!” gushed Clooney). While the recent hit film Zombieland was built entirely around Murray-worship — that movie climaxes with hero Woody Harrelson standing in front of Murray in a Beverly Hills mansion and screaming with excitement, “Bill - f***ing - Murray!”

“I’ve really gotten a lot of attention in the wholesale pearl jewelry past few years,” says Murray, with a who-would’ve-thunk-it shrug. “All of a sudden it’s like [points around the ostentatious hotel room décor], I’m getting treated like I dunno what. Handled with kid gloves.”

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City money is returning to the counties

10/15/2009

Money and land go hand in hand. The credit crunch might have been expected to put paid to the phenomenon of the lifestyle farmer — the City magnate who dons his wellies, packs his family into a Land Rover and decamps to Gloucestershire to commune with the soil. Very Spring 2007, you might say. Yet it seems that metropolitan money is returning to the counties. Knight Frank’s country house department sold 40 per cent more rural retreats last month than in September 2008. Maybe this is because farmland has outperformed the FTSE 100 share index over the past 15 years, or perhaps bankers are simply seeking a more socially acceptable job title.

“We are seeing tentative signs of a return of the pearl jewelry lifestyle buyer,”Andrew Shirley, head of rural property research at Knight Frank, said in his quarterly farmland report.

This is attributed to the recovery at the top end of the housing market, enabling financiers to fund farm purchases with the sale of Notting Hill townhouses. Shirley estimates that lifestyle buyers make up 25 per cent of the total purchasers of farmland; Savills puts this figure closer to a third. “Lifestyle buyers are still very much in evidence for the right property,” said David Cross, director of Savills’ farm agency.

The limited availability of land has caused values to rise. Cross reports that supply is down by 16 per cent across the UK compared with August last year, and his office in the South West has “run out of stock after having had the busiest six months on record”. The Knight Frank farmland index shows that there are 15 per cent fewer acres available for sale this year than last, and that farmland values in England rose by 3.2 per cent to just under £5,000 an acre in the pearl jewelry wholesale third quarter of 2009, the second successive quarterly increase.
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Farmers also benefit from the weakness of sterling, as their subsidies are initially calculated in euros.

So what type of country estate is special enough to lure the financier-turned-farmer from the Square Mile? Moor Place, a Georgian manor house with 781 acres in the well-heeled village of Much Hadham, six miles from Bishops Stortford in Hertfordshire, has form in this area. In 1886 it was bought by a former Governor of the Bank of England, Montagu Norman. Four subsequent generations of Normans lived at Moor Place, but his great-nephew, Bryan Norman, also retired from the City, is now downsizing and selling up. The Grade I listed house and estate are on the market with Strutt & Parker for a cool £17 million.

For this you get a beautiful red-brick manor house built in 1779 with 14 bedrooms, plus dining room, drawing room, library, kitchen, breakfast room, nursery and playroom. The total interior size is 18,891 sq ft, including two basement staff flats.

Separate accommodation includes a four-bedroom house with its own walled garden, five cottages and a two-bedroom flat in the Grade II* listed stable block.

In the grounds are a pool, tennis court, walled kitchen garden, Grade II listed summer houses, plus an 85-acre park, 38 acre of woodland and a small shoot. Then there is the farm — 640 acres of arable land and several agricultural buildings.

The reason for its price tag is proximity to wholesale pearl jewelry London, which is 40 miles away, and 45 minutes on the train from Bishop’s Stortford. This raises the value of the land to £7,000 an acre, well above the £5,000 average, according to the agent, Sarah Macdonald-Smith. A buyer will need to take time out from farming to redo the interior decoration, which is English country house at its chintziest.

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10 tips for spotting an unfaithful partner

10/15/2009

You might think you have a strong relationship, but what if you came home, sat down at the computer and discovered a suggestive email from your partner to a work colleague?

For most of us, the thought of our significant other cheating is the stuff of nightmares that we hope we never have to pearl jewelry endure. But if Ashley Cole could cheat on Cheryl and Jude Law could forsake Sienna then is it really wise to be so complacent?

Indeed, a recent survey revealed that one in ten Britons would have an affair if they could get away with it. Of the 3,000 couples surveyed for Onepoll, 12 per cent claimed to have cheated on their spouse and a third admitted sleeping with someone else when in a previous relationship.

So if deceiving your partner is as commonplace as the statistics lead us to believe, how do know if it's happening to us?
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When I emailed friends asking them to share break-up stories for my book, It’s Not Me, It’s You, a guide to getting over heartbreak, the replies came in thick and fast. Infidelity may have been just one theme of the book but it was certainly a subject that fired up the most people. Suddenly, my inbox was brimming with tales of infidelity, betrayal and dastardly deception.

There was the young lady who discovered her beloved had painstakingly photographed and then hidden away all her belongings so he could convince the girl he went on to cheat with that he was living the single life in pearl jewelry wholesale his bachelor pad. He later used the photos on his phone to put everything back in its rightful place. Ingenious you might think, if he hadn’t forgotten to erase the pictures.

Then there was the girlfriend who overheard two gossips in a neighbouring toilet cubicle feverishly debating whether she had any idea her boyfriend was sleeping around. Ouch.

Not to forget the woman who returned home after a few days away to find the remnants of white wine when her partner only drank red. Her suspicions were then confirmed by the long auburn hairs scattered all over her bed linen.

Interestingly, in each case, before these philanderers were finally caught out, their behaviour was already viewed as suspect in some way by their better halves.

And while there’s no sure-fire way to wholesale pearl jewelry catch a cheat (phone tapping or lie detector tests on the Jeremy Kyle show seems a little extreme), my research - in which I spoke to numerous women who learnt the hard way - did reveal a host of womaniser signs you can look out for.

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10 tips for spotting an unfaithful partner

10/15/2009

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With neither the Tories nor Labour winning favour, a Hung Parliament isn't unthinkable

10/15/2009

Their large lead in the opinion polls makes it all too easy to assume that the Conservatives will win a clear majority at the next General Election. But the polls also show that the lead is based more on pearl jewelry dislike of Labour than on positive approval of the Conservatives.

The support for the two largest parties is fragmenting — Labour’s victory in 2005 was supported by a mere 36 per cent of voters, and an increasing number of MPs sit for smaller parties, such as the Scottish Nationalists, Democratic Unionists and, particularly, the Lib Dems. Furthermore, some MPs who have abused the allowances system may lose their safe seats. For all these reasons, combined with a distorted constituency map, it is possible that in May the country will wake up to find the Conservatives don’t have an overall majority. What then?

The country rightly senses that the middle of a deep fiscal crisis is not the time for delayed economic measures and political opportunism, which were the characteristics of the last hung Parliament in 1974. This means the Liberal Democrats must convince centrist voters that they can handle a hung Parliament. If they don’t, many centrists fed up with Labour will vote Conservative — or alternatively stick with Labour on the basis of “better the devil you know”.

Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrat leader, and his deputy, Vince Cable, need to position themselves as ready to shoulder the burden of responsibility for hard economic choices, and help to provide, with one of the big parties, the principled, practical government that the country so sorely needs. That means talking to voters about participating in a government of national unity.
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The Liberal Democrats, from now until the election, should repeatedly assert not that they are going to form the next government — which is not plausible — but that they intend to be part of the next government. They should also establish a principled position that they intend to negotiate with whichever party has the largest number of MPs after the election.

A government of national unity must have one essential building block: immediate legislation to ensure a fixed term for Parliament. Only with the certainty of a four-year Parliament can Liberal Democrat MPs risk the unpopularity in the early years of helping to take the tough economic decisions. The right of a Prime Minister to ask for a dissolution would end, and calling an election before the four years are up would need Parliament’s approval. A dissolution would occur only on a Prime Minister’s motion if it was carried by a sufficient number of the same MPs who voted for the last Queen’s Speech — this would in effect give the smaller party a veto.

In return for supporting a government of national unity, the Liberal Democrats would have the right to demand a firm commitment to pearl jewelry wholesale a referendum on proportional representation. If the electorate approved of changing the voting system, PR would be introduced for the following general election.

Nick Clegg was right to reject at his party’s conference Labour’s crude suggestion of timing a referendum on PR to coincide with the next general election. This would have been an undemocratic fix that would have discredited the case for fairer voting.

Both the Labour and Conservative conferences attempted to woo Liberal Democrat voters to their side. David Cameron chose to emphasise his party’s green credentials, its civil liberties record and its proposals on decentralisation, which carry a hint of more fiscal autonomy for the devolved parliaments. Mr Cameron has already expressed an interest in fixed-term parliaments, a concept to which Mr Clegg is also committed. Gordon Brown tried to woo Lib Dem voters by stressing his international economic expertise and concerns about poverty and social problems.

On the surface, Liberal Democrats would find it easier to deal with Labour on Europe. But scratch below the surface and one sees that Labour’s record is hard to defend. Tony Blair’s readiness to give up a substantial part of Margaret Thatcher’s negotiated rebate without any radical reform of the Common Agricultural Policy or Common Fisheries Policy (CFP) was a costly blunder, which appears motivated by his wish to be the first president of the European Council. His appointment, after Labour’s reneging on its manifesto commitment to a referendum on the Lisbon treaty, would be a democratic disgrace.

The challenge for a government of wholesale pearl jewelry national unity led by the Conservatives will be whether Liberal Democrats can be party to a Queen’s Speech that contains a promise to have a referendum on the next EU treaty. This will have to be ratified in 2012-13 and will deal with the entry of Croatia and Iceland, which would involve large reforms to the CFP.

The Irish government will also want to put into the next treaty all the verbal assurances about the Lisbon treaty that it extracted from other member states. It would be a big prize if the Liberal Democrats, as part of the Government, negotiated improvements to the Lisbon treaty and then won a “yes” vote in a referendum on the new treaty.

Liberal Democrats will have to do better in the polls if they are to bring about the situation where we could have a government of national unity. But only if they constantly advocate such a government will they gain in relevance. Championing a new and radical pattern of government would appeal to centrist opinion.

But some Liberal Democrats fear losing their identity. They might prefer at first just to sustain the Government in votes of confidence. This would leave some of their backbench MPs freer to vote down specific legislation. Some Liberal Democrat MPs could take office within a government of national unity, while Nick Clegg stays out of office to hold his party together.

There is a widespread feeling in the country, after decades of political incompetence, spin and sleaze, that there must be root-and-branch reform of British politics. Only a few of our politicians have yet grasped the gravity of the challenges we face. Yet many voters believe that a continuation of the failed one-party system of government — with the adversarial language and attitudes that it engenders — should not continue in the 21st century.

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