Seemed to take forever to get up today. I wasn't actually ready to face any kind of world before 11am. By which time, Lord H thought it was probably too late to do a day's birdwatching (which was vaguely planned), so we went shopping in Guildford instead. Nice day for it, but an extraordinary lack of people. Perhaps they all decided they were too late for a decent day's shopping and are watching birds instead. It's a mystery ...

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I had a bit of a freak out - or eppi as the kids still sometimes say – at school yesterday. Fortunately the only two people to witness it were the colleagues who 'caused' it in the first place. I've put 'caused' in inverted commas (sorry, MD!!), because, to be fair, a less emotional, er . .histrionic type might have stayed and discussed the matter calmly like a rational human being. Except that as far as I was concerned NOBODY BLOODY ELSE was being rational. Doing it again. Sorry.

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Tilly and I spent the afternoon at ZaZa’s yesterday: sandwiches, cakes, shortbread and more cakes – all home-made, for breakfast, lunch and I took some away for dinner at work. Howzat for bad habits? Then I began today with two of her rolls and am planning the last of the shortbread for lunch, in a minute! Just as well I’m arranging to begin a new life next week, isn’t it?

We had a great time yesterday, talking nonsense; of course funerals came up, and the outfits we would wear, and what would or should happen to our bodies

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There used to be a terrific series on Radio 3 - Monday afternoons, as I remember - called Stage and Screen. It was always a stand-alone programme about theatre or movie music, from the acutely avant-garde to the blockbustingly popular, and apart from the fact that it was always full of all that gorgeous repertoire, the discussion of the interaction between drama (and so at least by implication, storytelling) and music was consistently illuminating. The Broadway musical seems an impossibly tight form to us novelists, lying back comfortably in the arms of our own baggy monster of a tradition. And composing music, complete with beginning, middle and end, for a three-minute-forty-seven-second cue which has already been shot, is also something to make even those of us who are turned on by technical and formal challenges feel a bit weak.

I get grumpy when it seems that the nearly as tight principles of screenwriting are being applied to fiction without any acknowledgement that the two art forms are in many ways fundamentally different, and that happens a lot, not least in books about creative writing which ought to know better. But there's no denying that the basic simplicity of the novel-like elements of a musical (the time-frame of the experience so relatively short, the music/set/choreography doing much of the work that the novelist has to do for themself) can mean that the big bones of the storytelling can be seen and discussed amazingly clearly.

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Very little sleep last night – we were back very late from Pulborough Brooks and didn’t actually hit the pillows till gone midnight (it’s an hour’s drive from home). However, we did manage to see a whitethroat, a chiffchaff and a woodcock, as well as the spoonbill still on the Brooks, plus an assortment of finches and the usual suspects. And we heard nightingales and – result! – nightjars and saw a woodcock. Fabulous. So it’s worth the pain today then, and makes the nightmare of yesterday a tad more manageable. Just a tad though ...

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Editing is hell. There is no other way to describe the exercise. It's like performing root-canal treatment on yourself with nothing to hand but a small hand-drill and a bottle of vodka. The biggest problem is that you start to feel as though your book is 'getting away from you'.


By that I mean that by instigating those well meant (and undoubtedly correct) edits, suggestions and pointers that your editor gives you, you will change the book so fundamentally that it will be transformed into something that isn't yours anymore.



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Over at Vulpes Libris I've been talking about something I've talked about here more than once: what I think it is that defines literary fiction. It's been an interesting exercise, not least because I wanted to set up a general discussion about how literary fiction works: some terms, some ways of thinking about it, and why it's worth bothering with. What I didn't want to do is say 'X is literary and Y isn't literary,' because people will always argue about that: what's 'difficult', what's 'worth it', is always going to be a very muddly mixture of objective and subjective reactions. It seems to me much more interesting to unpick the question, and let people try mapping it onto their own reading, and see if they agree.

In fact, it seems to me that most of the blood that's shed when people start discussing and classifying books is because it's so hard to separate out what a book evokes in you from what it is of itself.

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The authors reading before me are all awful and tedious and I find the whole thing embarrassing. Authors should be secretive, shadowy figures, a figment of the reader’s imagination, something otherworldly lurking out of sight. Here they are now on a makeshift stage just metres away from normal people, desperately flogging their work and stripping the process bare of magic and mystery.

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Ye gods, what a day. Managed to have a bit of a lie-in and got up at 7.30am, hurrah. So an extra hour-and-a-quarter's kip, which I have seriously needed today. It was just a shame that the nasty plumber who's chasing Lord H for a Church Hall cheque which Lord H gave him two weeks ago rang at 8.45am and was generally rude. I swore at him, told him he should check his post more often and put the phone down. I then deleted the five equally rude messages the tosser has left during the week. In one's forties, one finds one has no qualms about being rude to idjits. Aha!

The rest of the day has involved a heck of a lot of travel, some visiting of the sick and a much-appreciated moment of genuine laughter with the Tesco car cleaning man ...

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Right, I'm away for a few days from tomorrow, taking a well earned break.

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