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Latest NewsTuesday, 23rd December 2008Another day, another party or two and last night I was at the Big Green Bookshop in Wood Green raising a glass to the total lack of recession in that terrific little shop. I bought a bagful of books of course, including Tim Defender of the Earth and a weird cult thing called A Year in the Life of The Man Who Fell Asleep, which had me laughing out loud in the shop. Simon recommended The Suicide Shop – brilliantly dark - and I was laughing out loud again reading that on the tube on the way home. I do like the word lol, you know. Guffaw, chuckle, crack up, giggle, snicker, snort, whoop, titter, cackle, simper … This is beginning to sound like a hen party trapped in a sex shop and all those words have their uses, but none of them quite covers a simple, happy explosion of laughter like lol. So I hope your 2009 sparkles with love and your Christmas (or whatever you're celebrating) is a right lol! Add Comment | View Comments Friday, 12th December 2008 I celebrated finishing my rewrite of THE MOST INTIMATE PLACE (Maia Press, summer 09) by having a sinus operation last week and asked my kids what DVDs I should watch while I recover. Quick as a flash they were doing impressions of The Elephant Man ('my schname ish Woseshamary Fwerber'), followed by Dumbo, Pinocchio and ... Death Becomes Her! (No, I have NOT had plastic surgery, thank you, if I had that sort of money to play with, I’d buy a motorbike.) People had been queuing through several postal districts to assure me that a sinus op was terribly painful and would do me no good. With big smiles on their faces as if it was funny! Well, my suave surgeon knew better. He said that the operation wouldn’t hurt at all and should make me feel much better after about a week. Spot on. I’d never had general anaesthetic before and asked him what it would be like. ‘Oh it’s lovely, Rosemary, you’ll love it,’ he said, ‘it’s like drugs.’ The anaesthetist was more on my wavelength when she said it would be like a gin and tonic, just seconds before a feeling like ten gins and tonics came at me very fast. I woke five minutes later to find that two hours had passed and my breathing had already improved. Only one downside really: I have to avoid physical exercise for a fortnight, so my birthday spacehopper is still in its box. Love and thanks to my daughter and to my friends who helped me recover (you know who you are). Also to Kirsty Brooks for her talented nursing. Among other things Kirsty held my hand while the anaesthetic took effect; it was one of the most moving things to happen to me for years. Add Comment | View Comments Monday, 8th December 2008 I’ve come out of my writing tunnel to find the world changed almost beyond recognition. There’s a clever, brown-skinned family waiting to move into the White House, poor old Mumbai’s gone up in smoke and everybody’s potless. But some of the most thrilling things in life are still (nearly) free, like finishing my rewrite of THE MOST INTIMATE PLACE. I’ve been working on that thriller (among lots of other things) for about ten years and it’s done! I did the last tweak and emailed it to the Maia Press last Tuesday, just in time for a great meeting about how we’re going to make sure as many of you as possible will be able to get hold of it. (You’ll always be able to order through this site, by the way.) That’s the trouble with writing a book. You think the work’s done when you finish the first draft, but it’s not. You think it’s done when you find a publisher but they usually want another rewrite or even two. You think it’s done when you hold the book in your hand and your friends are having a merry old time at your launch, but it’s not. Getting your book into the shops is as big as job as writing the damn thing. But I’m ready! It’s fun of course. Booksellers are lovely people and they really do want to sell good books. It’s the gremlins in accounts who assume that all the human brain longs for is celebrity cooking and misery porn. Now that we’re recessing, it’ll be celebrity porn and misery cooking. Yum. Add Comment | View Comments Monday, 22nd September 2008 This is a week I’ve been looking forward to for quite a while: I’m starting the final edits on The Most Intimate Place to get it ready for publication by the Maia Press next summer. Maggie Hamand is going to be working with me (linking things, looking out for inconsistencies, bringing anything up to date that needs it, going deeper sometimes too) and I can’t tell you how much I’m looking forward to it. I admire Maggie in so many ways: not only does her press produce top quality writing inside beautiful covers, she’s also a theologian in her spare time. What mother who runs a business has spare time, but she manages it! So I’m going into my writing tunnel now, my loves, to have the time of my life. Add Comment | View Comments Saturday, 13th September 2008 Ten cheers for the Big Green Bookshop in Wood Green. They’ve just got ten more copies of What You See Is What You Get, not just because they’d sold out but because their children’s reading group has chosen it (chosen it!!!) to be their October book of the month. What a fantastic book shop it is. On the table by the door are the usual current novels and … HG Wells’ The Time Machine. Why’s that there? Well, because they like it really, it’s that kind of place. They're clever and lovely and they set up shop because the local Waterstone’s closed down, thinking that Wood Green didn’t need books. Well, anybody can make a mistake. Six months on, the Big Green Bookshop is thriving. Add Comment | View Comments Saturday, 6th September 2008 Thank God for Sarah Palin, she's an inspiration. You never thought you’d hear me say that, did you, but I wonder if maybe some of these characters I'm making up are a touch extreme sometimes. I look at Sarah Barracuda and I think Hell, no! I can write what I like. Add Comment | View Comments Saturday, 6th September 2008 I saw a rough cut of Fred Rowson’s film last night. No voice over yet, so it’s hard to know what’s going on but who needs Guy Ritchie, it’s Fred who’s our home-grown genius. He’s made me (god knows how) into a comic actress. The scene where Raj and I are distressed parents is hilarious and Fred’s planning to extend it to squeeze out more laughs. But Best Newcomer has to go to the gorgeous Maddie Battersby whose cameo is only minutes long but her eye-rolling is fantastic. She and I are already planning our big frocks for the premiere. Hell yeah. Add Comment | View Comments Wednesday, 3rd September 2008 I’ve been reading Evelyn Waugh’s Waugh in Abyssinia. I love Waugh: a snob yes, but never a word wasted. In this one he’s a war correspondent trying to find stories and nothing’s going on, loads of nothing, but that doesn’t stop the rumours flying. A telegram comes from London asking for detail on an alleged ‘nurse upblown’. (Telegrams used to cost by the word.) Waugh spends the day discovering that it didn’t happen. His cheap and cheerful reply? ‘Nurse unupblown.’ Add Comment | View Comments Wednesday, 13th August 2008 I’m so excited: a beautiful woman with large breasts is face down in a stone cell managing to look tasteful and incredibly sexy, and dead, all at the same time. She can be my body double any time. I’m looking at the new cover for The Most Intimate Place, my novel being published early next year by the Maia Press. It’s always a wonderful experience to see a cover. It means the book could actually happen, though you can’t really be sure until you see it on a bookshop’s shelf. The cover for my kids’ novel What You See Is What You Get was great but the publisher’s first suggestion was more like a Victorian factory than a Gothic abbey. They didn’t mind a bit when I asked them to take off the chimneys... This is a fantastic day for another reason too. My darling children are all on gap years at the same time, so this place is often like a spill-over set for Big Brother with partially dressed youngsters lolling around swapping impenetrable quips until the next lot of food pitches up. So I’ve got myself a studio. I’m going out to work for a change. One of the best things about being a writer is that I’ve been around whenever my kids needed me, at the sickbed, school gate, dentist’s, therapist’s or whatever. But it can be one of the worst things too. People keep breezing into my room thinking that I’m free to drop everything and do whatever vital thing they’ve thought up for me to do next. To be fair, I am often staring into space like a blonde transfixed by the bit on the orange juice carton that says ‘concentrate’. But soon I’ll be able to do my staring somewhere else, and with luck I'll have peace to hear my inner voices, my characters, again. As George Burns would have said, happiness is having a large, loving, caring family in another postal district Add Comment | View Comments Saturday, 12th July 2008 Get your hard hats, I’ve been acting again. Badly of course. They praised my Lady Macbeth at school which was nice, except that I was playing Bernarda Alba at the time. But I keep being asked and it seems churlish to refuse. So the back of my head (my best angle) featured briefly in the film of Blake Morrison’s book ‘When Did You Last See My Father?’ and now up-and-coming young film director Fred Rowson has asked me to be in his latest comedy short, The King of Deptford Creek. I was in Fred’s first film - about a man hunting Big Foot in south east London, a gently hilarious study of madness and rus in urbe - so I was surprised to be asked again. That first time I had to speak and pat Fred’s dog at the same time (don’t let anybody tell you this acting thing’s easy). This time I just had to sit and hold Raj Soolia’s hand all afternoon. Raj is lovely, so it wasn’t difficult and Fred seemed pleased with the outcome. Fred takes enormous pains with his work, and is amazingly calm and organised for a 19 year old. I foresee great things for him. Add Comment | View Comments Tuesday, 8th July 2008 It’s been a case of good girls keep diaries (or blog), bad girls just don’t have the time again. I’m working on a non-fiction book proposal (thanks to my wonderful new agent), which means that I’m all over the place interviewing people about their lives. I won’t give away details here, in case I’m so busy keeping the faith with my deep fat fryer and the washing machine that you go off and do it first, but the interviews are fascinating and wonderful and I want to thank all of you who’ve so kindly given me your time so far. It means that I haven’t touched my novel since the end of March though, and that means that a very big part of me is in a filthy temper, and will be until I get back to it. My inner novelist is a pretty tetchy person if she’s not writing. She kind of slumps inside me, and the other part - the lean, mean, non-fiction machine - has to be especially fit and determined to carry the dead weight. That sounds weird but maybe other novelists know what I’m getting at? Anyway next month I’ll be working on edits of THE MOST INTIMATE PLACE, getting it ready for publication by the Maia Press early next year. I can hardly wait. I have to get the non-fiction thing done first though, so I’d better go! Have a happy summer. Add Comment | View Comments Thursday, 19th June 2008 I’ve got a new agent - whooop! She’s Steph Ebdon of Paterson Marsh, part of The Marsh Agency who have exquisitely glamorous new premises in Albemarle Street, off Piccadilly. I couldn’t be more thrilled. Writing’s such a lonely business sometimes, bashing yourself against a brick wall must feel madly social and sensual in comparison, and having a really good champion makes all the difference. Add Comment | View Comments Monday, 26th May 2008 Dai Davies died of cancer last Monday. He was a top golf journalist and author, widely admired for his prose and judgement. The latter was maybe best displayed when he married my very good friend, Patricia Madill. She was a golf correspondent too, for The Times and it was one of the truly great marriages, full of laughs right to the end. It's typical of Patricia that she's telling everybody that on the day he died, she was at his side telling him about her progress on the history of a local golf club, something they were writing together, and anything else she could think of. The hospice staff had told her that hearing is the last of our senses to fade and she should bathe him in the sound of her voice, which she duly did. Dai gathered all his strength to lean forward and utter his last word in her ear: ‘Sssssh’. Add Comment | View Comments Tuesday, 20th May 2008 Police stopped a double-decker bus not far from where I live and arrested a gang of 24 boys aged between 14 and 18. They stripped them of their weapons: six knives, a claw hammer, a metal bar, a mallet, two wrench handles, a metal baseball bat, two screwdrivers and … a corkscrew and a golf club. Who let the middle-class trash into the gang? Add Comment | View Comments Thursday, 1st May 2008 I despair of this language of ours: it combines ‘man’ and ‘date’ and adds ‘exercise’ to produce something as dull as voting, and what could be duller than this mayoral election here in London. The main parties are offering us their remainders and binends and expect us to get all excited. I will go and put my mark on the page now, yes, but only because people went to a good deal of trouble to get that vote for me and I owe it to them. And there’s that thing Churchill’s supposed to have said about how democracy is the worst system of government in the world, except for all the other systems. But I do have that sinking feeling, more than ever before, that most politicians are on this earth to prove that not everything in nature has a useful purpose, and voting does just encourage them. PS 4 May 08: so now we have a Mayor whose middle name is de Pfeffel (trans. piffle). Oh joy. Add Comment | View Comments Wednesday, 30th April 2008 If you’ve tried to email me through this site recently, I’m sorry. People like Trouser Mouse and Rod Almighty have been snowing that email address with so many offers to make my Rolex rock hard all night, that I had to be whisked urgently to the pub to recover from a laughing accident. It was the one from Laurence CockWhopping that made me laugh out loud. As if I had a Rolex anyway. I would love to hear from you though, so please help yourself to the comment boxes, and there’s always facebook of course. Yours ever, Rosy Joystick. PS: forget that, there's a nice new email address in the contact box now and it's got perfect manners. Feel free to use it! Add Comment | View Comments Friday, 28th March 2008 It's done. I'm done. Where's the bar? Add Comment | View Comments Sunday, 16th March 2008 I’ve just come back from a week’s retreat where I’ve been a lean, mean writing machine in the perfect seaside flat above an Italian restaurant, next to Thresher’s. What could be finer? It’s all very rough, still in longhand, and I’ve no idea if it’s any good but I’ll think about that later. With a first draft only one thing that matters and that’s to press on, and in another couple of weeks I should be done. Then I might sleep for a week, and have a party. Add Comment | View Comments Saturday, 8th March 2008 After getting about thirty seconds’ sleep all night because of nerves, I’ve just done a fanfare for the opening of the Big Green Bookshop in Brampton Park Rd, just off Wood Green’s High Street. When Waterstone’s decided to close the local shop, and didn’t listen to a hefty petition, the shop managers decided that Wood Green still deserved a proper bookshop and have set one up themselves. Playing a fanfare in the street to Wood Green’s shoppers was a pretty strange experience, but I had my trumpet teacher Karen Straw beside me and at least she knew what she was doing. By 11am when the tape was cut, the place was crammed full. The shop is small, in fact, and has been lovingly put together in only two weeks by Simon, Tim and friends. It’s also utterly delightful. In among the novels, I found a collection of Neruda’s poems. Simon had left there just in case anybody fancied it. I did. Add Comment | View Comments Friday, 7th March 2008 Good girls keep blogs and diaries; bad girls don’t have the time. Last week my main distraction was grade 5 music theory, my first exam in a very long time. I’d forgotten the full horror. The exam was in a school in New Cross but they’re all exactly the same. That smell of school mash. The lady invigilators who keep whispering and coughing. I had a severe stab of panic on first sight of the school hall – those rows of desks - and the nerves got worse when I looked at the exam paper and realised I’d forgotten my reading glasses. I knew it was a music exam when the bloke behind me started humming. No, I didn’t steal his ideas. Anyway, in the previous week I did four mock papers and managed to pass them all, even the one where I had a go at midnight with quite a lot of house white inside me. (Don’t ask me why I did it, how would I know that sort of thing?) Got a merit for that one in fact. And no, I wasn't marking it myself. Hope it hasn’t been a mistake to do the real one stone cold sober... Add Comment | View Comments Monday, 3rd March 2008 Jill Robinson’s leaving London. This is very sad news for all of us who love her writing groups. It’s even sadder because her darling Stuart is very ill and they have to go back to LA for him to be nursed among their families. I only discovered Jill’s Wimpole Street Writers last summer and wish I’d found her years ago. She is the most wonderful person, with such understanding and generosity where writers are concerned. (She says wryly in Perdido that writers should be treated like convalescents.) Her magic ingredient is food. Twice a week she’d host evenings around her dining table and feed us all. Who’s got pages, she’d say with that lop-sided smile, and we’d know that we’d have to have a damn good excuse not to have three pages tucked in our bag or top pocket. We also knew that our three pages would get the most loving encouragement. Such genius in that length, three pages. Not too much to produce even in the busiest week, never too much to listen to. Jill and her husband Stuart would read their own pages too, of course, and what a privilege that was. Even the way she called us all ‘writers’ was good for the soul - she’d never dream of calling us students or pupils. They say happiness isn’t something you experience, it’s something you remember. I’m not sure about that, but I'll never forget Jill and Stuart. She plans to start something similar in LA. Lucky LA. Add Comment | View Comments Wednesday, 6th February 2008 Who says the internet is reducing the personal touch in our lives? I couldn’t find my copy of Enemies of Promise the other day – must have lent it to somebody - so I had a look on amazon, found that it’s out of print and ordered a second hand copy, nice and cheap. A hard-backed reprint of the 1948 edition has just arrived and inside is a hand-written note to ‘Dear Rosemary’ from Laura of Lazarus Books who hopes I enjoy it. So lovely, like a present from an old friend. I open it and inside are two perfect white feathers, each about six inches long, lying beside Auden’s verse: ‘O plunge your hands in water, Plunge them in up to the wrist, Stare, stare in the basin And wonder what you’ve missed’. Hm. Add Comment | View Comments Monday, 4th February 2008 Writing sometimes feels like life and death, and books probably wouldn’t get done if writers didn’t feel that way. But I’ve been reminded today that the biggest privilege is to nourish real people and love them, and try and keep them alive. Add Comment | View Comments Saturday, 2nd February 2008 I’m living long hand these days. That’s why I haven’t posted here for a while. The prose had been flowing as fast as a sloth pushing his zimmer to court to stand trial for being slothly on the M25, but now I’m about half way through my first draft of LOVED UP (under contract to the Maia Press) with more coming each day. This is thanks to a fantastic fortnight in Whitstable, away from family and other lovely distractions. How did I cope with being so long on my own? I’m used to plenty of voices around and mouths to be filled. So at first I pretended there were other people there too, that I was on an Arvon course or something. On the first night I asked myself what my book’s about and why I bother writing it. Why bother writing at all really. That’s when a great big light bulb went on in my head. I love writing. I do. I’d forgotten that! I love being in my own world where I’m cocooned with my page and a pen, lost in it all. I love it when characters wake me in the night. I love it when I think I know what I’m about to write and it turns out to be totally different. Best of all is the moment when I get up from writing something that has rushed at me fast and hot and might just be good. Writers get so angsty about writing, you’d think we were peace-keeping in Baghdad or tracking rhinos. But when it’s going well, it’s the best fun you can have with your clothes on. So here’s my personal solution to the Blank Page Problem: I fill the first blank page with why I love writing. It turns out to be different each day. And then I’m off. That blank page is pure adventure! It’s better than sitting on a rollercoaster with your greatest love beside you and your belly full of the finest champagne … Do you want to write too? Excellent. Have fun. Add Comment | View Comments Saturday, 19th January 2008 On my first night away in Whitstable, listening to the wind howl straight through the window frames, I sat down to write and set about procrastinating as usual. But without the net, I was stuck. I longed for the cosy library feel of wikipedia and the party roar of facebook, and found myself wondering what Cyril Connolly would put on his list of Enemies of Promise if he were writing now. In 1938 he listed the things that kept writers from doing their best work, and his list ranged from the sort of tireless research that gets you nowhere to journalism, which pays and is in print too quickly and spoils you for Literature. His most famous obstruction was the ‘pram in the hall’, which for him deterred male writers. Female ones didn’t seem to cross his mind. Now it would be the off-road double buggy and baby sling, and fund-raising for school books and SATs and driving them everywhere in case they get shot in the street and gap years and... there's shopping of course, and ‘having a coffee’ and having your nails done and calling it cogitation - I have my nails done, therefore I am - and television. Oh yes, television would definitely go on the list. Watching it. Writing for it (even if your surname is Davies, Russell T or Andrew) and fooling yourself that seeing faded panto dames eat grubs in the jungle is studying the zeitgeist. All a writer needs is (a) peace, (b) determination, (c) pen and paper and (d) more of all the above. And love of course, from loved ones who know when to keep their distance. Who was it who dedicated his book to his wife without whose tender ministrations his book would have been finished in half the time? Happiness (as George Burns said) is a great, big, loving family, in another city. Add Comment | View Comments Monday, 24th December 2007 Ho ho ho, tis the season to watch out for the splashes of vomit on every platform, couples trying to re-enact the Fairytale of New York, yelling ‘How could you!’ and ‘You’re never touching me ever again’ right there in the middle of Oxford Street and everybody drinking so fast they should have racing colours on the bottles. We buy this year’s presents with next year’s money, and I for one have loaded up on guns that fire elastic bands, slimy centipedes, musical twister and the Scooby doo game, and I might even give some of them away. I’ve vastly over-catered on the chocs and alcohol as usual, and none of it will be wasted. Every Christmas I’m filled all over again with simple amazement and wonder that a single day can take so much preparation and still be worth it. Tis the season to be jolly – I hope yours is wonderful. Add Comment | View Comments Thursday, 13th December 2007 On Tuesday evening I was still thrumming with the power of that fantastic gig when I learned that my first love has suddenly died. I feel as if I can hear one of those WW2 bombs somewhere close and I’m waiting for it to land. We loved so intensely, we could scorch onlookers a hundred paces away and it all ended acrimoniously, as it was bound to, without much dignity for anybody. Putting it behind us was probably the best thing both of us ever did, and we never met again. But that love reverberated on through my life and every now and again, he would appear in my dreams. Always the same dream: we were in a conservatory together, though I haven’t got a conservatory, and he’d hand me a drink and talk about his day as if he was still my husband, as if he still ‘owned’ me. I used to wake from those dreams burning with anger that he was still in my head after all that time and I hadn’t had one for a while until last weekend (after he died but before I knew). I was having a dream about shooing crowds of people away from my desk so that I could bloody well work when who do I see looking for me but him. He’s standing in a dark overcoat and grey woven scarf, the age we are now, as beautiful as ever. We catch eyes, speak a little, and he’s going, hovering, is he going? Yeah, he’s going but we’re connecting, standing square on, and I know he wants me to hold him. Nothing more complicated, he just wants to be held. Which is what I’m about to do, when a woman friend of mine bustles through and takes my hug, the one I was making ready for him. She’s talking at the top of her voice and in no time the crowds are coming back, filling my office again, and my kids are there and he catches my eye one last time, before he turns and walks away, waving. Add Comment | View Comments Monday, 10th December 2007 Yes! I am one of the happy few off to see Led Zeppelin at the O2 tonight. At this hyper-hyped gig of gigs, fandom is far more important than mere money so we queued yesterday for three and a half hours to pick up tickets we'd already paid for, and had plenty of time to wonder why it was taking so long to check everybody. JFK is faster, and they take your mugshot and finger print. Could it really be worth it to hear Stairlift To Heaven and Bin a long time since I lost my hair? Well, the first time I heard Stairway, I saw a roomful of 15 year olds discover that something could be more important than sex. We all peeled off each other and listened, silent, barely moving, as it played ten or twelve times straight through. Nobody did laugh out loud at the lyrics actually. All lyrics were rubbish in those days, ask Ozzy. Besides, I was brought up in a house full of opera, so I was used to tuning out the words and hearing the voice as another musical instrument. On to university where it was the background, no, foreground music of my first love. Four guys clubbed together to afford one copy of Physical Graffiti and we walked like heroes, our bellbottoms trailing like seaweed, down to Andy’s record stall in the market on the day it was released. When that first love went awry, I got furniture and he got the LZ albums, and I don’t have to tell you who got the better deal. Mind you, I wonder how much they’re worth now, those originals of ours, so drenched in beer and tears. Then – love does funny things to you – I married a Cliff fan and became the sort of person who would go to his friends’ wedding rather than hear LZ at Knebworth. I’ve never quite forgiven myself. When Bonham died – one drink killed him, nobody remembers whether it was the 40th or the 41st – the music died too until … yes, I do remember exactly where I was when Pictures at Eleven came out. Percy looking so cool in those chinos. Chinos! For me eighties music is Robert Plant. My kids grew up on Tall Cool One and 29 Palms, and last Christmas my 18 year old took time after a party, three in the morning, to thank me for bringing him up in a house full of Bonham as well as Bach. My brother took a tumble in his luck in 1998 and I made sure we were both at the Clarksdale gig at Wembley. He’s got us into tonight’s gig and if it’s half as good as that Wembley one, it’ll be a stormer. Add Comment | View Comments Saturday, 24th November 2007 The Bookseller to the Stars has interviewed me for his blog. It was surreal actually, a bit like postal chess, but as virtual sensations go, one of the best. If you scroll down www.markfarley.blogspot.com it won’t be long before you come to the interviews in the right hand column and there I am. There’s plenty of highly entertaining stuff on the left side of Mark’s page to distract you too… And on Wednesday (28th) I’ll be on Jill Schary Robinson’s radio show. Jill is a fascinating and wonderful writer and a heroine of mine, though I don’t really do heroines. Her programme is very popular all over the world and consists of relaxed writing chat around her dinner table in Wimpole Street. I’ll be there to talk about being a children’s writer, though I’m not really a children’s writer as such, it’s just one of lots of sorts of writing I’ve done. What You See Is What You Get started off as stories for my own kids and it was pure luck that it got published first. (In fact I didn’t believe it when Wolfhound Press sent the contract; I thought there’d been a mistake and some poor sod was opening my rejection letter while I was reading his royalty clauses.) I really wanted to be a famous playwright by now actually, and spent five or six years up a cul de sac trying to write deathless plays that never happened. That period still breaks my heart! But that’s how it is with writing, you keep writing and perfecting and trying different things, until the day somebody else says yes. And nothing’s ever wasted. Add Comment | View Comments Monday, 19th November 2007 I’ve resorted to desperate measures: I'm not letting myself have a haircut until I've written another 20,000 words. If you see me out and about looking like Boris Johnson without the will to live, please - no need to be polite about it - kick me all the way back to my desk. I do need a haircut, but I need those 20,000 words more. Add Comment | View Comments Sunday, 18th November 2007 I seem to have wakened up a whole year older, which is a shabby trick to play on a person at my age, except that I’ve just had the most fantastic birthday present ever: my first trip to New York. Usually the most exotic travel experience I get is a touch of taxi lag, but last week I was in Manhattan with my husband and all three children. And that first sight of the famous skyline coming in from JFK actually did take my breath away. I was nearly knocked breathless again walking through Times Square, on our way back from seeing a brilliant production of Chicago. A stretch limo misjudged the turn, reversed and pushed forward again, nearly right through me. Within seconds, the crowds were around it, milling past with arms in the air, and I stopped for a fraction of a second (no more, I promise) just to admire the mayhem. Immediately a voice behind me barked in my ear: ‘Ya talking or walkin?’ The kids say I was so busy looking up, it's a miracle I wasn't run over several times but they have a failsafe system in NYC where the split second you’re in the wrong place, about twenty drivers, even from several blocks away, lean on their horns to warn you. Just what I needed as I have to confess that I’ve acquired another vice. I’d never really liked cocktails before, usually because it seems to take at least half an hour to produce a thimbleful of something that tastes of horse shit mixed with nail varnish remover without the insouciant charm. But I promised myself that on my first night in NYC, I’d raise a Manhattan (vin du pays and all that) in honour of Dorothy Parker in the Algonquin hotel. One? Who said one? ... Nothing a trip up the Empire State couldn’t cure of course, where King Kong was actually running up and down the marble halls, I swear. A little shopping was done, I will not lie. A woman’s place is in the mall after all. But we were there for a bar mitzvah on Upper West Side and it was, I have to say, a most glorious experience. You might get a flavour if I say that gammon was served at the family get-together the night before, and the entire ceremony took place in a restaurant. A young female rabbi led us with terrific grace and gentleness through the whole procedure and I loved the easy banter between her and young Jamie whose big day it was, and who acquitted himself with faultless maturity. I left London tired and came back exhausted, and wouldn't have missed a second. My favourite experiences other than the bar mitzvah? The Frick, and Toys R Us on Times Square! Add Comment | View Comments Sunday, 4th November 2007 This site’s just been updated! The biog has the latest on my lovely new contract from the Maia Press for two novels (for adults this time – sorry, kids) and the most fun could be that now you can comment on what I say here. I’m half way, no, about a third of the way through a first draft at the minute and will be talking about how that feels. Anybody who writes knows what a quagmire the middle section can be. Some writers do the finish first so that they’ve got something to aim for. Makes some sense if you know where you’re going, but only if you do. And of course the one and only thing that matters with a first draft is not whether it’s any good or whether it remotely resembles what you set out to write, but that it gets finished. I was talking to Anne Redmon who's a hugely experienced novelist last week about how if you can’t get to the desk for a few days, the characters seem to get huffy and wander away. Mine gang up and head into town for a party without inviting me. It’s a hell of a business getting them all back and in condition for work! Yes, I know it’s mad, of course it is. But then as Alan Alda said, insanity's just a state of mind. Add Comment | View Comments Sunday, 4th November 2007 Hey! You've asked already where my gorgeous trumpeters went. Don't worry, marvellous Mark of 1staspect (all-purpose website genius) is working on a photo gallery for us here - they'll be back soon! Add Comment | View Comments Friday, 19th October 2007 What is a snicket and why is it lemony? What did the Very Hungry Caterpillar turn into? If you know and you’re anywhere near Waterstone’s in Greenwich tomorrow morning, would you like to come to my family book quiz? We’re taking over the Costas coffee shop on the first floor from 11 o’clock and there’ll be questions for all age groups from babies to grandparents. I’ll be trying to keep some sort of order. See you there! Add Comment | View Comments Wednesday, 10th October 2007 Today my mother would have been eighty, if she hadn't died in February 1985 after over twelve years of cancer. To borrow a line from Forrest Gump, that's all I have to say about that. Add Comment | View Comments Tuesday, 25th September 2007 It’s not often Greenwich hosts a film premiere but last night the great and the good of south east London crammed into the Picturehouse to see the new film of Blake Morrison’s memoir And When did you last see your father? Blake’s book was published fourteen or fifteen years ago to huge acclaim, and Anand Tucker has taken six weeks and a tiny budget to make an excellent film of it. Colin Firth does a beautiful job as Blake (Blake must have been a very good boy in a previous life, is all I’m going to say) and the bath scene is unmissable. Juliet Stevenson puts in a deft performance as his mother, with her smile in the final scene illuminating the whole film. Jim Broadbent plays the ogre father with huge sensitivity, and Sarah Lancashire is wonderful as the father’s controversial friend Beaty. Why am I mentioning all this here? Because last March Blake asked friends to come and fill out an award ceremony scene as extras. We were up before the dawn to present ourselves at the National Liberal club for one of the most ridiculous and hilarious days of my life. The family have awarded my husband Best Supporting Actor award for listening to Jim Broadbent for a whole three seconds without butting in, and I get Best Back of Head Visible for One Second or Less. Thank you, thank you, you’ll have to forgive me, I was so surprised to get this award, I dropped my acceptance speech. Add Comment | View Comments Monday, 24th September 2007 Too much of a good thing can be wonderful. I’ve just had lunch with Maggie Hamand of the Maia Press and over the spicy aubergine in Soho she handed me a contract for TWO novels: The Most Intimate Place and the one, still nameless, that I’m working on at the minute. Bertrand Russell thought that the secret of happiness is to face the fact that the world is ‘horrible, horrible, horrible’. Well, he wasn’t hanging around with the right people. Maia is a small literary press, very highly thought of, and I like and admire Maggie very much. I couldn’t be happier. Add Comment | View Comments Thursday, 20th September 2007 Success is supposed to be relative - the more success you get, the more relatives – and it was fantastic to see my friend Dreda Mitchell surrounded by her family at Islington Borders last night launching her thriller, Killer Tune. Dreda and I met at the first writing course I ever took, in the 90s at Goldsmiths’. It was a weirdish course but deep ties were made, not least between Dreda and her Tony. When was it exactly? Well, I could swear I was up to my eyes in bibs and calpol until at least 1994, but Dreda reckons it was earlier and Dreda's always right, or so she tells me. Anyway, she won the Crime Writers Association's John Creasey Memorial Dagger Award 2005 for Running Hot, and Killer Tune is (somehow) even better. I tell you, those pages are turning faster than Richard Hammond on a greased cheetah. Add Comment | View Comments Wednesday, 19th September 2007 I’ve just come back from holiday and found a box of author copies of You’re Nicked on the doorstep. My 21 year old son grabbed one and didn’t budge from the armchair until he’d read it straight through. And yes, he did laugh. Spotting a stranger reading something you’ve written is a thrill, but when the nearest and dearest are engrossed, that's a deeper pleasure. Add Comment | View Comments Monday, 20th August 2007 I’m in shock. My next oeuvre, a collection of daft crimes and criminals called You’re Nicked, is due out next month and I’m told it has the honour of being marketed next to something called What Shat That. You have to admire the poetry of that title but I suspect it’s more waste pipe than Waste Land. You’re Nicked should be available from the last week of Sept. Add Comment | View Comments Sunday, 19th August 2007 Yes, it was yo ho ho and a bottle of Coke in Greenwich Waterstone’s yesterday where the big read for children had a pirate theme. Kids all know what a pirate looks like these days - it's Johnny Depp playing the spawn of Keith Richards - but it was fun to remind them just how much of what we think about pirates comes from the written word. There’s Treasure Island for a start. (This 1990 film couldn’t be better: Oliver Reed as Billy Bones, Christopher Lee as Blind Pew, young Christian Bale as Jim.) I let Blind Pew grab Jim and tip Billy Bones the black spot right there in the middle of the shop, and tap his way down toward the river, before we moved on to Peter Pan and the bit where Hook plots to kidnap Wendy and Peter teases Hook that he’s a codfish. I did lots of different voices, as you do, and there were giggles all over the shop when my posh Hook accent deepened and morphed into Lady Thatcher. Which worked beautifully of course but was a pretty bloody sinister experience for me. As Gloria of Waterstone’s said though, once you shake the Disney sugar off Peter Pan, it is very funny; Peter is in fact ‘a little sod’. At the King’s Road branch, lots of little girls were having their faces exquisitely painted with butterflies, ready to hear me read Eric Carle’s The Very Hungry Caterpillar. I’d forgotten what a treat it is to read to little ones. My kids loved this story so much, they used to fight about who could have it under their pillow. I had to buy them a copy each. Add Comment | View Comments Tuesday, 14th August 2007 This Saturday Waterstone’s are having a big read for children all over the place and you’ll find me at the Greenwich branch (turn left out of Cutty Sark DLR station) reading for the 10 plus age group at 11am, and at the King’s Road branch reading my favourite story for little kids, The Very Hungry Caterpillar, at 3pm. I’m not sure what I’m going to read at Greenwich. If you’ve any suggestions, I’d love to hear them. (Keep it clean, kids, please – there might be adults looking.) Add Comment | View Comments Sunday, 22nd July 2007 Yesterday my daughter was in bed with such a sore throat, I said I’d nip down to Waterstone’s and buy her Harry Potter and the Llanelli Shallows to cheer her up. I expected to be clambering over lorry loads of copies to get to the till but I couldn’t see any anywhere. I asked where the staff were hiding them. Had I ordered, I was asked. Ordered? I’d no idea you had to order. Well, sorry but they were sold out. By three in the afternoon? My daughter had been looking forward to it so much, she was ill in bed, I'd have to go back empty handed ... I'd almost moved myself to tears when a lovely man in a cycle helmet said that he and his wife had over-enthused and ordered an extra copy, would I like it? I could have kissed him. While the book was bagged up and bought, I explained how my daughter had adored the first six books and he’d no idea the difference it would make to her, what a saint he was etc. Gently he asked, your poor daughter, how old is she? I could hear laughter all over the store when I answered. I think I even heard it out in the street. She’s twenty-two. Which is of course the perfect age for a Potter fan: she and Harry were 12 together and it’s not her fault she’s grown up faster than he has. She's had the book twenty four hours now, is two thirds through and my girl who never cries is in floods of tears. Friends in their thirties are in the same condition! Who cares if the style makes Stephen King look like Flaubert, this is big. Credit where it’s due. Add Comment | View Comments Friday, 20th July 2007 I was going to write about how the smoking ban’s going to be the death of our national literary life. Think of almost any great writer of the past and they’ve got a cigarette stuck to the lip or fingers, from Marlowe and Raleigh (who can take the credit) through Greene, Kingsley Amis, Sartre, de Beauvoir, Auden and co, Coward and Rattigan, Fitzgerald (though drink did for him), Hemingway (likewise plus guns, always a fun mix) and Hunter Thompson (the fun mix plus drugs) right up to the valiant bastions of today like Bainbridge, Amis junior, Will Self and Martin Rowson, not forgetting both tutors on my recent (brilliant) Arvon course, Patrick Neate and Anne Redmon. Smokes and writing go together, don’t they? The muse likes a jumpstart? That’s what I was going to say … Then my youngest (and I do try to be a better example occasionally) said that surely all these writers would have expressed their talent anyway. Everybody smoked in the old days, and loads of them didn’t write well or at all, they just coughed and died. Who’s to say those geniuses wouldn’t have written more and better if they’d lived longer? Good point. I didn’t argue. But this notion that talent will always out? I wonder. I know so many good writers who don’t get recognised. Some get discouraged before they even finish a first draft, let alone find an agent and/or publisher and push on through the many rewrites to unwrap the book one day and then discover how hard it is to get a bookshop to stock it. It’s not talent that makes the difference, it seems to me, it’s commitment, perseverance and a judicious mix of sanity and insanity. Do fags help? I don’t know. I’ve given up again. I know it’s easy, I’ve done it so many times before. Add Comment | View Comments Tuesday, 10th July 2007 Greenwich Waterstone’s have just pre-ordered 50 copies of You’re Nicked for September, hoorayyy! Add Comment | View Comments Monday, 9th July 2007 At the Crime Writers’ awards last week Fred Vargas (who won the Duncan Lawrie International Dagger) was a double surprise: she’s a she, with a genius for tousled chic, and she’s also an excellent stand-up comic. Much funnier than the English translations of her novels. But Bob Marshall-Andrews QC gave us the biggest laugh. He was there to advise from his years of experience as a criminal barrister around the country, and said he was defending a chap in Devon once who had developed a gentle, yet passionate attachment to several of his cattle. Opening for the defence, he explained that his client had been discovered partially clothed, yes, standing on a milk churn close to the rear of the cow in question. But the act had not actually been fully consummated. The cow had shifted and kicked the churn over before any crime could ensue. A voice was heard from the jury box: ‘Yer. They do that sometimes.’ Add Comment | View Comments Thursday, 5th July 2007 I’ve just laughed out loud at George Melly’s two-page obituary in the Times, which I'm sure is what he'd have wanted. Great man. He didn’t give a damn who he shocked, and merrily blamed his mother for him being gay until he was about 30 (as if he needed an excuse) because she was very keen on gay actors and always filled the house with them when he was growing up. I’ve often wondered if his mother was as happy with his exuberant sexual life style as all that. When I was at College of Law, I was George’s mother's lodger, and she did indeed talk about Liverpool and the gay actors and how broad-minded everybody was when George was growing up. She could go on for quite a while actually, often after I’d had a long hard day at the law library and she was getting between me and the pub. Lovely lady though. Was she so liberal with me? No. No male guests, at all, ever. It was an extremely dry summer and we were not supposed to bath in more than two inches of water, so she left a ruler for me in the bathroom. George's old wooden school one apparently, suitably bendy. Just the six inches, since you ask. Clothes had to be hand washed too, and I did my jeans one day, spread them on a chair to dry, legs wide, and went off to college. I came back, heard about the gay actors again, and Liverpool, and George’s genius as a painter, that was another favourite topic, and went to collapse in my room. She’d been in (though she wasn’t supposed to) and folded the legs of my jeans primly together. Add Comment | View Comments Wednesday, 4th July 2007 My plan for world domination has had to go under review. My next novel, The Most Intimate Place, was due to come out next year … but publication’s been postponed until 2009. I’ve always been impressed by the Maia Press and they’d be perfect for this book, so they are worth waiting for. But I know this will disappoint the lots of you who have read the sample here and have kindly told me how very much you’re looking forward to the rest. Sorry. World Domination Plan B is of course in place: I’m doing the only thing a writer can do, which is to get on with novel no. 3 as quickly and strongly as I can. I’ll post samples soon… Add Comment | View Comments Saturday, 16th June 2007 Being a judge is pants, especially if you’re the Court of Appeal judge who was in the dock this week. He was going to feature in You're Nicked, my collection of weird crimes due out this September ... ‘First you forget names,’ George Burns said, ‘then you forget faces. Next you forget to pull your zipper up and finally you forget to pull it down.’ Court of Appeal judge, Lord Justice Richards, might have reached the third stage of wisdom, but the woman sitting opposite him didn’t forget his face. He’s been charged with exposing more than his sensitive side on the Wimbledon to Waterloo train. (Mirror, 3 March 2007) … But last week the judge whipped out his very own Calvins in court to display his innocence, arguing it was nigh on impossible to get anything out of them, on the train or anywhere else. Perhaps this should be a PHSE question in schools: Calvins, accessibility, discuss. Anyway, whatever went on in the jury room (my mind is still merrily boggling), he was acquitted. Good for him. And he’s cut from You’re Nicked. Add Comment | View Comments Friday, 8th June 2007 I love the net. From the top of its geeky bald head to the soles of its pork pie shoes, I adore it. Thanks to lovely Shauna from my Arvon course last week, I’ve made it onto facebook and what a glorious waste of time facebook is. It just sucks away the hours and is doing my laugh lines no good at all. I’ve hooked up with (no, mustn’t say that, I’ve caught up with) a writing friend I thought I’d lost, and discovered that for the last 22 years I’ve been living minutes away from a Belfast school friend I haven’t seen since I was 12. (She knows where the bodies are buried: we were at a school I was nearly sacked from.) Like everything human, the net has its darkness but this sunlit party side is superb. Add Comment | View Comments Monday, 4th June 2007 Writing’s more dangerous than I thought. I’d made it back from my writing course in Shropshire and was ‘resting my eyes’ in a deckchair when I dropped The Seven Basic Plots on my toe, all 728 pages of it. Is this comedy or tragedy? I’m still not sure. One thing I am sure of though is that the Arvon Foundation is a fantastic way to bring on writing skills, in anybody. My course last week was even more rewarding than I expected and I've been on an Arvon course before, so I knew to expect a lot. Anne Redmon and Patrick Neate both brought fantastic passion and generosity to the week. They were great fun too - Anne's story of being stuck in the desert with Marilyn French had us on our knees with laughter. Anne worked on my confidence (which badly needs it, despite appearances to the contrary) and in a single tutorial Patrick saw what was holding back the flow of my novel. Heartfelt thanks to them both. My fellow students were wonderful. Everybody produced excellent writing and with the help of a shedload of wine and fags, we stretched our talents for midnight bollocks-talk to new heights as well. Patrick left us all with the best advice about writing fiction, which is to write every day. Simple as that. It’s not the quality that matters (talking first drafts here) and it’s not quantity either. It’s frequency that counts. ‘Don't get it right, get it written!’ Add Comment | View Comments Sunday, 27th May 2007 This time tomorrow I’ll be in John Osborne’s house in Shropshire on an Arvon Foundation course led by Patrick Neate and Anne Redmon. I’m hoping to pick up a few pointers on plot and structure, and to wallow in the company of writers for a whole week. Not quite a whole week actually, as I’ll have to steal away at the crack of dawn on Friday to join in one of the most surreal musical fixtures in England, the Whit Friday Marches on Saddleworth. Lots of villages there host a brass band contest each, in the deadly serious brass band way, and any band can pitch up and join in. So we park the coach where we can and park ourselves in various pubs until it’s our turn. Then we march through the village playing a march (Great Escape last year, Ghostbusters this time) until we get to a field or car park where there's an adjudicator stuck on his own in a tent and we play a more traditional march for him. (Yes, it’s always a him.) Don’t laugh, we won money last time, almost enough for a round of drinks. I took up the trumpet six years ago and never dreamt I’d wind up marching behind police horses through packed villages in Yorkshire with a cornet stuck on my face. Our drummer got so excited last year, he bust his bass drum. He turned it round and carried on barely missing a beat. We finished our fifth contest just before midnight under stars and fairy lights, ratarsed and completely knackered, to a huge ovation. Glorious. Add Comment | View Comments Friday, 18th May 2007 Another spectacular victory for my team at the Authors vs Customers quiz in Waterstone’s in Kensington High Street last night. Congrats to Alison Weir, Sophia McDougall, Robyn Young and our captain Alice Hogge on digging up all sorts of obscure and hilarious facts; I wouldn’t be surprised if they can come up with another word for thesaurus and know why onomatopoeia doesn’t sound like anything. We had Lois the store manager on our team too, which gave us the advantage of the wine supply as well as her excellent brain. Our quizmaster Marcus Berkmann says that if in doubt, we should always go for the elegant answer. He certainly goes for elegant questions. Marilyn Munroe wore nothing but five drops of what in bed? Chanel No 5. Which American singer/song writer was driver to a senior Buddhist monk 1994 – 1999? Leonard Cohen. Samuel Rogers (1763 – 1855) lent his overcoat to two poet laureates who were … Wordsworth and Tennyson. I’m new to quizzes and had no idea they're such fun. Very many thanks to Lois and her staff - they were outstanding. This writers' quiz season is taking a rest now until the autumn. If you can't wait that long, Marcus hosts a quiz night here every Tuesday evening. Best of luck. Add Comment | View Comments Thursday, 17th May 2007 That was pretty confident, wasn’t it, saying I was back in the saddle. As if I just sit down at the desk and turn out a book like turning on the garden hose. Some books do come easily - Saul Bellow said that for one of his books, he just had to be there and catch it in buckets – but this latest one of mine has being flowing like glue, with the jokes taking off like penguins. Can’t have that. I've had family distractions lately but I've never seen that as an excuse and I'm not starting now. There's fear of course, that the book won't be good enough or to make it good enough could take years, wouldn’t it be easier to bin it now and run away? In fact, why bother to write anything ever again? … But this story is following me like true love with a conviction for stalking, so I broke the big task down into lots of little ones, and made myself a more realistic schedule than hoping that it'll fall out of the sky perfect by the beginning of the summer so I can go away and relax. While I was doing this efficient stuff, my pen dawdled over the page and I found I'd written something else too. Something I’d forgotten. It was that I write because it’s exciting. There’s nothing like the thrill of sitting down to write and finding that by the end of the day, by lunchtime even, I’ve been part of something I didn’t foresee at all, something astonishing. Add Comment | View Comments Saturday, 5th May 2007 You’re Nicked is finished. I’ve just emailed my collection of stupid criminals to my publisher. Done and dusted, and two months early too. The publisher wants it now and it worked for me to do it while all my kids were around for the Easter holidays. Now that I've got relative peace, I’m going back to my novel, for the third time. I wrote a first draft in October 2005 in three weeks flat, but it wasn’t right and I turned to other things like finishing The Most Intimate Place. That October idea (still nameless) kept badgering me though. Last autumn I said here that trying to nail it down was a bit like trying to find a horse and knowing my luck it could turn out like this. So far I could just about make out a shape in the distance and every time I went near, it vanished. Well, I’d got close enough before Easter to feel its breath mixing with mine and for it to let me grab a hank of mane and climb up. Though it feels wild at the minute, I’m hoping for this sort of exciting too with a twist of sadness. Great to be back in the saddle. Add Comment | View Comments Saturday, 28th April 2007 My brother’s become what the medics call an organ donor. He’s bought a Ducati ST3, as yellow as a daffodil with, I hope, the Lord’s Prayer printed in easyread on the tacho. People who buy bikes that size should have their heads examined, and often do, but I’m so envious I could kill him. I hope he doesn’t manage that for himself though - easy, tiger - as the last time I saw him on two wheels he could fit comfortably into my biker jacket. (Imagine that, children.) Been writing your name in hot rubber on the M40 yet, Davy? Or is it all a joke and you’ve really got one of these? What about when winter comes and you can't feel your fingers and toes, and the rain's settling in a chilly puddle between your legs? Four wheels good, two still better. If you fancy joining the ducatisti at the North West 200, I’ll be happy to come along and put the playing cards in the spokes for you. Add Comment | View Comments Friday, 27th April 2007 It doesn’t matter whether you win or lose, it’s whether I win or lose that counts. Who said that? Homer Simpson probably - well, he should have been in my quiz team in Putney Waterstone’s last night along with Alison Weir, Sophia McDougall, Robert Low and Alice Hogge. Only the five of us against tables of six all bristling with intellectuals. (Hang on, didn’t Auden say that an intellectual was somebody who’d found something more interesting to think about than sex? No, I don’t think I’ve met one either. OK, bristling with people who looked too clever by three quarters.) But we won! Thanks to Alice for her expertise in Ant & Dec, and to Rob and Alison for being the only 2 people in the room to recognise the dates of the Pony Express. Sophia weighed in with vital info about Keats and Scott Fitzgerald (can you guess what that question was?) and I must have known something but I can’t remember what. A good team effort but special congratulations go to Alison Weir. If she doesn’t know the answer to a question, there isn’t one. She had the lyrics to You’re Beautiful, no problem at all with the ten most popular pub names in England and when our quiz master Marcus Berkmann dared to ask which queen featured in Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary, Alison had chapter and verse to prove that it was not Mary, Queen of Scots as he dared to suggest, but Mary Tudor. If you fancy taking us on, the next similar bash is at Waterstone's Kensington on May 17th from 7pm. Add Comment | View Comments Friday, 20th April 2007 A lot of the people who died in Virginia Tech on Monday were the same age as my children. A lot of people died in Baghdad this week too. Which made me wonder about quantity. Big numbers. The Baghdad slaughter took me back to the sense we had when I was growing up in Northern Ireland that the horrors happening there every day were just boring to everybody else. Big numbers do get attention. Journalists get excited. Politicians love them - maybe it makes them feel needed. Above all, the perpetrators love quantity because, in the West at least, their name is attached to the deed and they get the celebrity that passes here for life after death. But does a big number make us feel more? Deanne Asamoah made it to a News in Brief in the Times this week. She sounds like a really brave wee love. She’d been looking after her terminally ill mother on her own for four years when she overdosed on the morphine prescribed for her mum. She was 13. Her death came with a big number beside it too: Barnardo's reckon that about 175,000 children are in her situation in the UK. As John Cheever said, sometimes 'courage tastes of blood'. Add Comment | View Comments Friday, 13th April 2007 Charles Ingram. Has nobody told him that there are only two rules when you're dealing with teenagers? Rule 1: never raise your fists, it leaves your groin unprotected. Rule 2: in case of extreme provocation, see rule 1. Ingram's so fed up with people coughing at him that he’s been back in court this week. He’s the one who tried to defraud Who Wants To Be A Millionaire. He combined phone-a-friend, ask-the-audience and flu by getting a friend in the audience to tell him the answers with coughs. Long time ago, but a 13 year old boy hadn’t forgotten. He saw the major jogging past, so he greeted him with a hearty cough. Which a lot of people do apparently. Joke? Ingram didn’t think so, he grabbed the boy by the lapels and threatened him. The major, who didn't deny it, was convicted but got an absolute discharge. The wisdom of Solomon. I suspect the magistrates live with teenagers who, as they say, are God's punishment for having sex. Have I got room for the major in You're Nicked, my collection of bizarre crimes? You bet. Add Comment | View Comments Wednesday, 11th April 2007 Putney's Waterstone's is hosting an AUTHORS vs CUSTOMERS QUIZ on Thursday April 26th. Hurray. Please phone Mark (the manager) or Chantelle on 020 8780 2401 if you'd like to reserve tickets. The authors interested so far include: Saul David , Alison Weir, Jessie Childs, David Loyn, Justin Pollard, Alice Hogge, David Dickinson, Paul Strathern, Sophia McDougall, Robert Low, Matthew Parker, Tom Holland, Adam Zamoyski, Leonie Frieda and me. More details as I get them. Add Comment | View Comments Wednesday, 11th April 2007 You’re Nicked is acquiring a substantial ‘love’ section. A couple of examples: Thomas Stepiowski was working in Dorset factory and missed his Polish homeland so much, he took to fondling women’s breasts and pinching their bottoms while making grunting noises. The ‘Polish Borat’ claimed this behaviour was normal in Eastern Europe. Weymouth magistrates didn’t agree. Neither, incidentally, did his female interpreter. He was jailed for nine months. (Daily Mail, 8 November 2006) Meanwhile on the Mumbai sea front, more than 100 couples discovered the price of love when they were arrested for kissing and holding hands. Kissing in public is technically illegal in India. Lovers carted off for being found in ‘objectionable positions’ faced fines of up to 1,200 rupees (£14.30). (Times, 7 April 2007) I came back from something the other night to find Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind on television. When I start working on my novel again, I would love to find such an urgent and beautiful context for exploring heartbreak. Of my two main characters, one ends happily, the other not so (damn, I've given it all away) because that's the way it is with love. Plenty of films show the joy and sense of victory and sweetness when girl finds boy and boy finds girl again, how lovely. Not so many films look at the price we pay when there is no happy ending, at the aftermath and the dreadful trudge back to some sort of life. Eternal Sunshine takes a hard look at that damage, and asks what it’s for, and asks with such style. Add Comment | View Comments Saturday, 7th April 2007 Tonight's my seventh social event in ten days. My heart says yes. My head says yes. What does my liver say? It can tell me after the Boat Race. Today’s race (4.30pm) features the heaviest man ever to take part: Cambridge stroke Thorsten Engelmann weighs nearly 111kg (245lb). Quite a lot of it could be brain but you can never tell these days. Reminds me that within a week or so of arriving at university I went along to a college boat club do, ready for anything, and found myself among lads so tall it was like standing in a forest. It was one of the high water marks of my life actually. I was given an oar, loved it and discovered sport for the first time. I did recover of course, and this afternoon I’ll be yelling at the telly with a can in my hand in the traditional way. But my heart will be crashing at the start and I’ll remember that feeling of terror combined with rigor mortis and feel pretty bloody glad it’s not me out there. But is the boat race really a spectator sport? This is a spectator sport. I’ve reached the half way mark, by the way, in writing my sensitive exposition of bizarre criminal activity, You’re Nicked, to be published by Crombie Jardine in the autumn. Warm pomagne all round, whatever the liver says. Bolly when it’s done. (PS: congrats to Cambridge on their perfect combination of size and technique. Could swear that's Prince William getting a soaking second from the right. More use than ornament after all..) Add Comment | View Comments Friday, 30th March 2007 Another day, another book launch. This time it was south of the river (only just) at the Hayward Gallery to welcome Blake Morrison’s novel South of the River. Boy was this an A-list event. As I said to Maureen Freely (who translates Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk), I can’t stand name-droppers so I won’t bother to mention that among those who turned out and got busy being famous together were Margaret Drabble, Michael Frayn, Wendy Cope, Graham Swift and Andrew Motion. Though he’d had fulsome reviews already, Blake actually seemed nervous about the book’s reception and while thanking his agent, he remembered that eleven years after his first commission he’d had to pay back the advance! No chance of that happening with this one. I don’t generally read long fiction – busy mother, no time - but I've read all five hundred and whatever pages of South of the River and it's a beautiful book, readable, wise, sexy and funny. It has great range without letting the reader feel the strain for a moment, and the most moving bit, I think, is the description of Jack’s care of his dying wife. I have Blake to thank for getting to know Maureen on the set of a forthcoming film of his memoir And When Did You Last See Your Father; when Blake asked his friends if they'd like to be ‘literary’ extras for a day, we both fancied an adventure. Yes, I did laugh when I heard that Colin Firth was to star as Blake (who was laughing first of course, was Johnny Depp too busy etc) and didn’t quite believe the whole enterprise until I was sitting on set in somebody else’s glad rags being paid to smoke free cigarettes while resting my eyes on said Mr Firth delivering Blake’s lines. There are worse ways to spend a morning. Add Comment | View Comments Thursday, 29th March 2007 I look like something out of a Tim Burton movie today, or maybe I mean John Prescott, after last night’s launch of a new biography of David Cameron, the man who hopes to get the UK back to its knees. The co-authors are James Hanning and Francis Elliott, both of the Independent on Sunday, and (amazingly) it’s a first venture into authorship for both of them. I’ve known James Hanning a good many years and he’s one of the loveliest and most sanguine people ever born, so I wasn’t in the least surprised when I asked if they’d had any trouble co-operating and Francis said there had been no moments of froideur, no. (I love it when journalists use French, it reminds me of my kids showing off their swimming badges.) It was clever to hold the launch up school here, being politically neutral, yet across the road from the Houses of Parl on the evening when the Lords were doing their best to scupper the government's casino plans. Lord Lamont and AN Wilson were among the many people scanning the index for their own names and the whole occasion was wonderfully suave. Best of luck, James and Francis. Political biogs are not my favourite bedtime reading but I’ve dipped in – yes, the text, not just the pictures – and it looks like a belter. Add Comment | View Comments Friday, 23rd March 2007 There’s a rumour going round that I’m writing a raunchy novel. How could people say such a thing? I am indeed writing something with the working title Love Goddess. And it is quite spicy in places, several places, lots of places, yes. And the rumour tends to be among people who’ve read this. There are some terrific love goddesses by the way. I’m particularly fond of Frigg, a Norse goddess of hearth and home. And I like the sound of Oya, a Nigerian love goddess whose whirlwind breath can reduce your home to rubble and blow your brains straight out of your skull as if she was blowing an egg. So I thought I could make them into nice fictional characters and give them a love story each with lots of bonnets and bosoms and a happy ending, possibly involving tight breeches and wet shirts and weddings and dreamy kisses and … Then I thought, nah. Who's going to buy shit like that ? Add Comment | View Comments Sunday, 18th March 2007 Usually Mother's Day means that one of my kids will kindly hold the door open for me while I stuff the washing in the machine. This year I have a card - one dog says to another, 'I had my own blog for a while, but I decided to go back to just pointless, incessant barking.' Erf erf. Add Comment | View Comments Friday, 16th March 2007 Help me, doctor, I'm suffering from amnesia and I've got to go to a very important quiz tonight! Doctor: Amnesia can be very serious, Mrs Furber, have you had it before? Me: Have I had what before? I'm suffering this morning from the after-effects of excessive knowledge, mostly other people's. Last night was terrific fun, and reasonably civilised until our quizmaster Marcus Berkman broke all rules and asked us who missed a penalty in the opening ceremony of the 1994 World Cup. How can a bunch of pencil squeezers know anything about football? It was playing straight into the hands of the lawyers' table (led by my husband) who seem to spend their whole time watching Sky Sports. Besides, my table was women only. (I do come from a sporty family actually; my brother broke his foot once throwing a ball ... he forgot it was chained to his ankle.) While most of us racked our brains about Pele and Maradonna, a member of one table went to the loo and was spotted on the way back leafing through Beckham's 'autobiography'. Which would have been a hanging offence if it had been any use to him. The answer - and you'll need to know this if you ever kidnapped by crazed hoodies who refuse to release you until you've provided the correct answer - is Diana Ross. Which shut us women up, didn't it? The question obviously wasn't about sport at all. It was about music. No, my table didn't win but with only four of us there (Alice, Kate, Jessie and me) we weren't too disappointed to come third after the Harpercollins table (who nearly beat my daughter's table in the uproarious laughter stakes too) and the geeks' team led by Justin Pollard who sets the questions with Stephen Fry for QI. Very many thanks to everybody who came and to Adam Hughes and the Borders staff for their excellent hospitality. Add Comment | View Comments Sunday, 4th March 2007 ‘I never think at all when I write,’ Don Marquis said, ‘nobody can do two things at the same time and do them both well.’ There's a chance to see if writers can think and drink at the same time in a READERS VS AUTHORS’ QUIZ at Borders, Oxford Street on Thursday 15 March starting at 7pm. Marcus Berkman will be quizmaster keeping us all in order and yes, wine will be available. The authors’ teams are: Tom Holland (Capt) Justin Pollard Lucy Hughes-Hallet Matthew Parker and Conn Iggulden one one table; Saul David (Capt) Simon Scarrow Christopher Fowler Paul Strathern David Dickinson and Adam Zamoyski on another table; and here's the real challenge ... Alice Hogge (Capt) Jessie Childs Anna Hervre Kate Williams Sophia McDougall and me on a third. If you’d like to come (and see how little I know) please contact or call into the shop for a ticket in advance, details from events manager Adam Hughes on 020 7292 1620 or ahughes@bordersstores.com Add Comment | View Comments Sunday, 4th March 2007 'Mummy, can I go out and watch the eclipse of the sun?' 'Of course you can, love, but don't stand too close.' Eclipses are central to my ghost novel What You See Is What You Get and last night's fantastic eclipse of the moon took me back to the solar eclipse of 1999, the first one in years where any of the UK had a chance of seeing totality. It was a cloudy day, one of those days when you’re not sure whether it’s going to rain now or later, and I was lucky to be in the Isles of Scilly, one of the very few places the sun came out at all. In Cornwall and Devon people had to make do with talking about cloud formations! You can read about it here . Add Comment | View Comments Thursday, 1st March 2007 You can go for days without a ridiculous crime cropping up, then several come along at once. Today’s pickings include an ASBO for a man selling lager from his ice-cream van outside a school in Wales, a chap who couldn’t be prosecuted for kerb-crawling in Dorset because he’d brought his bike, a Milan school teacher who nearly cut the tongue off a 7 year old pupil with scissors to shut him up (didn’t work, did it?) and a Mexican who’s in trouble for sexually harassing a rich woman 50 years his senior. ‘He said he couldn’t live without me, that he loved me,’ the 98 year old widow said wearily. A man is only as old as the woman he feels, and as healthy as her bank account. In a couple of months I’ll start to sift through the mountain of daft crimes on my desk so that Crombie Jardine can publish my definitive collection – You’re Nicked - in the autumn. Add Comment | View Comments Sunday, 25th February 2007 My daughter’s been finding her theology course at university more than human frame can stand, and who can blame her, so last week we went away to the seaside for some mum-on-one time. The situation is an opportunity of course, not a problem, and through our unshed tears we toasted the opportunity good and hard while discussing religion and writing and dark, dark thoughts. Are there any thoughts so dark, we wondered, that you can’t make fiction or humour out of them? (My daughter wants to be a stand-up comic and will be excellent, none better.) Write in black ink on one side of the page only, no cheating or conferring or breaking out in crippling shakes, you have precisely three hours starting now... Add Comment | View Comments Friday, 16th February 2007 Yesterday began at 1am with me being interviewed on Adelaide radio about daft court cases and finished in a Thai restaurant in Waterloo with Alison Weir, Justin Pollard and Kate Williams whose excellent biography of Emma Hamilton is coming out soon in paperback. In between, Elizabeth I was voted the greatest British Monarch, in Greenwich anyway, thanks to Sarah Gristwood’s charm and devilish advocacy. Alison Weir had been rooting for Henry VIII, and she swayed me. Justin (who also sets the questions for QI) spoke brilliantly for Alfred the Great and lost only, I feel, because of lack of salacious detail about Alfred’s private life. There must be something juicy you can tell us, Justin, about that ‘cipher’ wife. Why was she locked away? Was it because her cooking was even worse than Alfred’s? Or was it because she looked like (or worse, sounded like) the lovely Stephen Fry? Add Comment | View Comments Monday, 12th February 2007 Research – I love it! Some writers do research by picking their nails in the London Library all day. For my new novel I’ve just arranged to pick the brains of Karen Straw who plays the trumpet with two of her friends in a combo called Got The Horn? (It’s their question mark.) You can see their fabulous CV here – Karen’s the one almost dressed in red in the middle. She deputised in my brass band once years ago and pulled off that Brassed Off stunt even better than Tara Fitzgerald did in the film. Karen trotted in wearing spike heels and white jeans held up by a prayer. The guys all fluffed out their chests, waiting for disaster... The minute she began to play, jaws clanged to the floor at her brilliance. We won’t be able to get together until after her tour with Michael Bolton finishes at the Albert Hall in April. What am I writing at the minute? A twisted love story, darkly comic, with loads of music. As usual. Add Comment | View Comments Saturday, 10th February 2007 I’ve just booked myself on an Arvon Foundation course. I went on a playwriting one a couple of years ago which was so good that in the middle of the night some of us decided to cook up some real life drama of our own. We were in Ted Hughes’ old house in Yorkshire and with a bottle of red in each hand (that’s how I remember it anyway) a dozen of us headed off in the dark to toast Silvia's grave. Of course we couldn’t find it but we saluted her anyway, and then spent a merry couple of hours persuading a bipolar poet not to chuck himself in the river. The countryside can have that effect on people. Give me London every time where my average working week is less country mouse, more Jeeves unleashed in New York. (Like Jeeves, I adore the ladies’ roller derby. In fact I'm sure that’s me in the no 13 vest and perennially fashionable big pants.) But I can hardly wait for the course I've just booked. Arvon courses are always in beautiful places with terrific people and they've done me a power of good in the past. This time it’s novel writing. Never too late to learn more. Add Comment | View Comments Wednesday, 7th February 2007 Greenwich Waterstone’s is hosting its ‘WHO'S THE GREATEST BRITISH MONARCH?’ debate at 7pm on Thursday 15 February. Alice Hogge will be in the chair, Alison Weir will be arguing for Henry VIII, Sarah Gristwood for Elizabeth I and Justin Pollard for Alfred the Great. Tickets are £3 redeemable against any book you buy on the night and you can pick them up in advance from the shop (beside Cutty Sark DLR station), phone 020 8853 8530 or email manager@Greenwich.Waterstones.com See you there. Add Comment | View Comments Wednesday, 7th February 2007 I gave a talk to the Blackheath Wives last night. What could be nicer on a frosty evening than to chat with a group of clever, well informed women about books and writing? I’d asked what they wanted to hear about. My journey from being a mum to being a published writer was the answer, but for me there’s been no journey from one to another, the two things have always gone together. I tried to write fiction while I was a lawyer but it all came out like legal letters. It was my children who unlocked my storytelling and inspired WHAT YOU SEE IS WHAT YOU GET. Mothering doesn’t stop anyway. They’re all bigger than me now, but the washing machine’s still on every day, the hob rarely cools, life goes on … which is exactly how I like it because there’s plenty to write about. Add Comment | View Comments Wednesday, 7th February 2007 Some of the Blackheath Wives are shocked by my thriller The Most Intimate Place. I left samples of its opening chapters with them last night. Want to judge for yourself? Go to the Releases page of this site, click on the TMIP cover and you'll find the same sample there. Any complaints to rosemary@rosemaryfurber.com and I'll come round with a crash team and/or liquid revival techniques depending on the severity of the situation. Add Comment | View Comments Thursday, 25th January 2007 I had a thoroughly 21st century experience yesterday. My 21 year old goddaughter phoned me just before Christmas to say that she'd just had a boob job. She couldn’t lift her arms and wanted to hide under her duvet until the pain went away. I offered to buy her the most wonderful bra we could find as soon as she was well, which was yesterday. Agent P of course. My stomach heaved when she said that things haven’t quite knit yet and if she jumps up and down too fast the pads could shoot up inside the skin and give her shoulders like Joan Collins in Dynasty. I reminded her of the scene in Casino Royale when Bond’s girlfriend has drowned in the lift and he’s trying to revive her with CPR. Poor man, he searches for a bit of breast bone he can press without bursting her bags, makes a couple of pathetic jabs and … no, it’s hopeless, she’s got to die. Alice smiled; she’d much rather die than forego her new DDs. Later we had our make-up done in Selfridges, my way of subtly persuading her that men might still be interested in her lovely face. If only it were true. Add Comment | View Comments Monday, 22nd January 2007 Skegness is so homely it could only muster a couple of hoodies on Friday night and I swear they were sucking their thumbs. As I drove into Planet Butlins though, I felt as if I’d strayed onto the set of Night of the Living Dead with people mooching about, eyes rolling, arms outstretched in search of food that wasn't Burger King. I’d check in before I joined them. My band had teased me about the ‘Platignum’ chalet they’d booked for me because I said I didn’t want to share a room, could I please have a place of my own where I could be insomniac in peace. Besides, I’ve been on these jollies before and things can get messy. (And who, they ask, is one of the messiest? OK, OK, I confess.) Anyway, I checked in and shuffled off my find my 'standard' chalet, in the original 1960s section. I could smell the fag smoke from yards away. A couple of weeks ago fine, but I’m a non-smoker now. I am! I opened all the windows and a 5 degree wind cut through me. Shut them again. That’s when another bouquet hit me. More farmyard. Pungent. No top notes of gooseberries or pencil shavings, this one was all bottom notes being, not to put too fine a point on it, pee. I shut the loo door. It didn’t help. I shut the hall door. Same result. I lay down on the bed, poured myself a glass of the Chablis I’d brought for emergencies and switched on the Friday Night Project. Things could be worse, I thought. No, they couldn’t. The smell was rising from below me. Should I get all princessy and demand an upgrade? After the four hour drive, I hadn't the energy. Anyway, how would I look with my coat over my nightie, zombie-shuffling in my builders’ boots and most of the bottle of Chablis inside me? The staff could be forgiven for deciding that the root of the trouble was me. I slept on the floor. Which meant that in the morning I had the treat of boinging up and down on the bendy plastic shower tray, followed by a near-heart attack when the power-trickle came on and the icy shower curtain grabbed my legs like something from Pirates of the Caribbean, and I don't mean Johnny Depp. Luckily not all the rooms are like that. Another cornet player let me have a spare room in her sea-view, 'Silver' apartment for Saturday night (thank you, Lynda) and things improved enormously. What on earth was I doing there in the first place? I’m still not sure how it happened to a die-hard Led Zeppelin fan like me but I was playing my cornet in a brass band contest. (A Mineworkers’ contest, no less. I do have some mineworker’s credentials actually: my first marriage was to a miner’s son and I’ve been down one of the Kent pits while it was still active.) So, apart from Nightmare in Piddle Close and the band coming next to last in our section, the weekend was fantastic. Add Comment | View Comments Friday, 19th January 2007 With one bound she was free! I’ve had enough of the domestic graces for a while and will be spending the weekend in Butlins at Skegness. Why on earth would I want to go where the house red is ketchup? I’ll tell you when I get back… Add Comment | View Comments Tuesday, 16th January 2007 I’m at a very early stage of a new novel and it’s a bit like trying to catch a horse in a field. It's there in the distance but if I march up too fast, it runs away and hides. I have to keep sidling up and hope it’ll let me lay a hand on its neck for a second and get a clear look before it’s off again into the mist. Today it feels as if I’ll never catch it. In fact it feels that if I even get to clap eyes on the bugger, it will probably look like this. Add Comment | View Comments Friday, 12th January 2007 I’m surrounded by clean livers. They’ve given up alcohol, these clean livers, so they can boast about their clean livers, and they do. So pious. Personally I never mention that I haven’t had a cigarette for a whole century (since 3am on 6 January 2007.) That's when I found my youngest sucking on a roll-up as if he’d smoked 40 Gitanes a day since the age of 2, which he hasn’t, I swear. Not that I know of anyway. So I’m bound to set an example. But drink, now that’s another story. Add Comment | View Comments Wednesday, 3rd January 2007 You know you’ve had a belter of a New Year’s Eve when you need the plumber to help you clear up. I had a two-party approach to New Year’s Eve. In fact, being a lib dem I fitted in 3 parties, and made the mistake of leaving a member of my family in the company of my father and some 50% proof Ardbeg whisky. In a moment of exuberance someone sat on the bath taps and nearly detached them from the wall. A bottle of classy red to Vogueress who has correctly identified the culprit as my darling husband who remembers nothing of that evening from about 10pm. Add Comment | View Comments Wednesday, 27th December 2006 Christmas might be about love and Jesus to some people; for me, it’s about cooking. On Christmas Day my husband and I were a brilliant team: he plucked and stuffed the turkey, so all I had to do was kill it and shove it in the oven. Now I’m up to my elbows in running the Furber Greasy Spoon, all night breakfasts a speciality with the finest runny eggs and crispy chips in the hemisphere. My kids found this and swear that Stephen Fry's doing a perfect impression of me in the kitchen. I’m flattered. I didn’t think my language was that restrained. Add Comment | View Comments Sunday, 24th December 2006 Children can be so cruel. I’ve been reminded that my Santa skills weren’t always all that. It’s not just that I’d wake them up with my stumbling and swearing as I tiptoed into their bedrooms. One Christmas Eve I forgot about doing Santa completely. (Don’t ask me why. How would I remember that sort of thing?) What I do remember is three angry children waking me on Christmas morning going ‘Mummy, what have you done with our presents?’ Well, they’ve got to have something to tell their therapists. Wouldn’t be normal otherwise. Happy Christmas. Add Comment | View Comments Wednesday, 20th December 2006 Christmas. The only solution is to chainwatch Bad Santa alone in an off-licence locked from the inside. But would Santa find me there? I’ve come through all three stages of Santa: first I believed in Santa, then I didn’t believe, then I got to be Santa myself, usually plastered at four in the morning. Now my kids are far more grown up than I am and nobody wants to know. They want 10lb boxes of money and no trimmings, which is sad. I know which off-licence I’d hole up in: Theatre of Wine in Greenwich. I was there at the weekend looking for Belgian beers and as soon as I came through the door, somebody said ‘Must be time to open another bottle’. Corks were popping and happy people were quaffing away. That’s the true spirit of Christmas if you ask me: hospitality combined with a magnificent selection of drink. Cheers, everybody! Have a good one. Add Comment | View Comments Wednesday, 13th December 2006 Greenwich Waterstone’s is having a Christmas party tomorrow 7 - 9pm with the chance to meet Tom Holland, Lindsey Davis and, if you’re not careful, me. There'll be free wine and mince pies and a gift wrapping service for the many books you’ll want to buy. If you’d like to be there please let Ally know on 020 8853 8530 or at manager@greenwich.waterstones.co.uk Add Comment | View Comments Monday, 11th December 2006 Bishop Tom! You deserve to have UPI (Hons) after your name in honour of the Unidentified Pissed Injuries you picked up with excellence and style this weekend after a party (‘just a few ales, officer’) at the Irish Embassy. Did nobody warn you that the most lethal thing about the Irish is the hospitality? You won my admiration years ago as a patron of Spires and you can drink with me any time. To hell with the warning on the bottle that drinking with the Irish can seriously damage your (delete as appropriate) teeth/ sex life/ wallet/ hopes of promotion to God/ chances of finding your car in the dark ever again. Add Comment | View Comments Thursday, 7th December 2006 It was the AP Watt authors’ party last night and what fantastic hosts they were. But I’ve made a shattering discovery. Writers are miserable sods. Anybody propping up the wall refusing to take his or her lips off the glass long enough for conversation was a writer and the longer they’d been writing, the more miserable they were! Having come through a week of severe bruising to the heart, I could have posed as a Booker winner but fortunately I met the marvellous Salena Godden whose memoir’s being published by Harpercollins next year. Salena hauled a bunch of us off to the Colony Club where she found some even more miserable writers and forced everybody to cheer the fuck up |