I’m walking along Berwick Street again, ostensibly in search of good bargain records and pretending to myself that I’m not looking for James Hardy. Since tricking one of the Harper publicity crones into giving me his number, I have left a humiliatingly large number of messages on his mobile’s answer phone, but he hasn’t returned my calls.

I have kept alive the slim possibility that my messages have cut out each time at the exact moment that I am reciting my own phone number, leaving him unable to contact me, frustrated and desperate to go out again and perhaps let me ride on his coattails of success for a time.

My phone vibrates in my pocket. It is Linda, the ex-girlfriend who I met for lunch a few weeks ago, calling me for the twentieth time. I reject it, as I have done each time. Despite this, she refuses to take the hint and keeps calling. It is embarrassing for us both...

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We had Youngest Step-daughter's two littluns over at the weekend. Eldest Grand-daughter was just getting over chicken pox and Youngest Grandson was just starting it. I was up all night with him on Saturday as he writhed and screamed - although he did manage to snatch two and a half hours sleep from around 2.30 a.m out of pure exhaustion. It is a long time since I held such a sick infant in my arms and I felt so sorry for him. He is only ten months old, he didn't understand what was happening and couldn't tell me how he was feeling so he did the only thing he could - cry.

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Great title for a lit zine, eh? I am honoured that my flash, And Bruised, is published in Drunk and Lonely Men's third issue. These are their submission guidelines:

Submission Guidelines
Depress us.
Send up to 3 of your saddest poems or stories (250 words or less)
We accept simultaneous submissions and reprints, suicide notes and bomb threats.

I am delighted I managed to sufficiently depress them. Always the aim of my writing.
Go read the issue, it's killer stuff.

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Life is strange and beautiful. I am in love!!! But actually I have only had one conversation with this person. So maybe it's not love yet but just an immense feeling of unconditional like. And maybe it will be something this person will never know. I would like them to know but wouldn't even know where to start. Not something you can come out with " I'm blood group O" - "Really - you are just fantastic, I really like you - can you pass the milk please". Just doesn't have the flow. And do you know how I know? I lost my appetite when I was eating my custard and pie. And I love my custard. Nothing comes between me and custard. So it must be love. So to what vessel do I pour this unconditional like? At the moment it is overflowing and while I still have this cough and my throat hurts like crazy, I still am dancing around my room with joy. I wish I could tell. I wish I could tell.

My proof copies arrived today!



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The bookshshop manager, a tall woman in satin velvet printed with a kind of muted Mondrian pattern, made graceful arm gestures at the throng and at the speaker. Bamboo began to talk and soon had everone laughing at her anecdotes about Shanghai. I remember how well she compared with Xinran, no mean speaker herself, at the Asia House launch of 'Blue China'


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Well, I asked the universe last night for some guidance as to what my direction should be now... and I got a swift and positive response three hours later: my play, Exchange Rates, which I adapted from my story of the same name, (and is included in The White Road and Other Stories), has been shortlisted for the Total Beast 6-Minute Theatre competition and will be performed, along with the other ten shortlisted entries, some time in 2009. The winner will then be chosen, and will receive 200 pounds and a professional critique of his or her play......

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I can't stop talking about myself yet, it seems! My sixth stop on the Walking the White Road virtual book tour has me On the Couch over at Eric Forbes' wonderful Good Books Guide blog. Here is a small snippet:...

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One advantage of paying £14. 99 a month for as many films as you can watch, apart from saving on heating costs, is you don't mind the odd 'turkey'. That's just as well.


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I've never read any of Michael Crichton's fiction, but Mark Lawson's discussion of his work in The Guardian got me thinking. I've always maintained that, far from being sniffy about huge-selling writers with no apparent literary merits, all writers, whatever their ambitions for their own work, should have a long, hard look at what it is which those mega-sellers do, and readers in their millions so clearly want. Not just because snobbery is an unattractive quality, and even more unattractive in writers than in others because writers have some pretensions to seeing further into human nature. It ill becomes us to assume that so many millions of our fellow-humans are simply so coarse in fibre or ignorant that they don't know any better, and we had better bar the gates to these barbarians now. (Don't believe me that there are writers who think like that? Drop by a writing forum full of wannabe literati and listen in for - oh, all of ten seconds.)

But nor should we be long-hard-looking because we'll write whatever it takes - distort our natural writing into whatever shape it needs - to achieve Martina Cole's sales. Indeed, I agree with Mark Haddon that there's no moral obligation on an artist to appeal to the largest possible audience: if what you want to do is make art for a small audience who will utterly 'get' it, then that's fine by me, and if I'm part of that audience, that perfect fit may be one of the great aesthetic moments of my life. But writers by definition are trying to be heard:

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