"Did you go to school when you were younger?" The Girl asked the other day. Feeling mildly put-out that she couldn't immediately tell I'd been educated to degree level, I laughed and said:

"What, Mummy School?"
"Yes," she said, deadpan.
"Well, no. There isn't a school for mummies. You just have to get on with it. But I did go to real school."
"Oh." She looked disappointed...

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Lordy, what a day. No sooner do I get in than people are coming from all quarters with requests to add extra papers to the Bid Meeting today and wondering when the deadline was. Um, the deadline was last Wednesday, and yes they do know that!! So I am now setting a marital date with the photocopier as we are spending so much time in each other's company. It's the decent thing to do. Not only that but the Chair realised he couldn't even make the meeting, or at least he could be present only for the first half hour - which left poor David in the role of Acting Chair and frantically reading through the paperwork in an effort to understand what was going on. And as there is now officially more paperwork than War & Peace, that was one hell of a task ...

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Excuse me while I go a little 'Bridget Jones' on you for a moment and take a line or two to state last week’s vital statistics:

Books bought from a shop: 2
Books that arrived through the post: 5
Books still on order: 11
Books given away/sold on e-bay/thrown out/used as kindling on chilly days/in any other way ejected from the household: 0

On Saturday, Jeanette Winterson wrote in the 'Books' section of The Times that she starts each new year by lugging a load of unwanted books to the charity shop, so that she can 'fill up the spaces on the shelves with new possibilities'. An excellent idea. It's just such a pity that I find myself utterly unable to emulate her. I am, as you have probably guessed, a big fan of the new possibilities that new books bring; it's the eviction of old books to make room for them that tends to give me some difficulty. I just can't bring myself to part with them, not even as I witness the bookcases filling up and the unlucky newcomers forced to squat in piles on the floor, next to the shelves that should have been theirs.


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Mother in Yorkshire calls.
'I'm in the Supermarket,' she says. 'I thought they might have christmas cards on sale.'
This is my cue to reply in a seemingly intereted fashion that neither offends nor gives rise to lenghthy discussions about other items purchased at cut price.
'Guess what?' she says.
'They had advent calendars too?' I venture.
'Your book's on the shelf,' she shrieks. 'Five of them!'
Ten minutes later Husband in The City calls.
'I'm in WHSmiths,' he says. 'Guess what?'

Have spent most of the day attempting to keep up with the local RSPB group on their trip to the Staines reservoirs. My goodness, they move at the speed of sound. I just stopped for a couple of minutes to peer at an interesting-looking bird (which turned out to be yet another coot, dammit) and when I looked round they were already five miles up the path. And it's bloody hard to run in wellington boots, you know ...

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The Public Lending Right payments which have just been announced have made me think. If The Mathematics of Love alone can clock up that many loans for me in only eighteen months, how many books by how many authors are being borrowed by how many people nationwide? How many people have wanted to read a book, and gone and found it in a library, for free? How many have gone in to find a revision guide for their exam, and come out clutching a novel which will change their life? Or vice versa? Particularly touching, somehow, are the several hundred loans my PLR statement lists of the Large Print edition. PLR don't handle audio books, but I'd love to know about them, because then I could imagine more concretely that someone has sat in their car in a traffic jam, on the M3 or the M62 or on the Severn Bridge, and listened to Stephen and Anna speak.

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The post arrived this morning and contained two lovely surprises, hurrah! The first being a packet filled with sweets, chocolates and pens from PD Publishing and a note saying it was a late Christmas gift wishing me all the best for the year. Thank you very much indeed, Linda & Barb - a lovely thought! And it's really cheered me up - hey, I must be a real writer; my publisher buys me gifts ... A lesson also in how to get the best out of your writer which I suspect both Flame and my agent might do well to learn from ... Because I now feel very much that PD are working with me, rather than against or at me, and I'm all fired up to give them the best book I possibly can. What better writer management can there be?...

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All is well here at Bennett Towers. I was very happy yesterday to receive a copy of Von Bek by Michael Moorcock. It’s been a decade or so since I last delved into the brilliant world of the Eternal Champion, and having recently reread The Dancers at the End of Time sequence, my appetite peaked.

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Just what I need - an incentive to read some modern women's fiction. Lately I've read books by men, and some female crime writers. I never used to get on with chick lit even when I was a chick - or a bird as men who risked getting a bollocking in the 60s might call me. Come to think of it, that was mainly in films. I don't think I ever met anyone who said it. Maybe even then the media just had its own life and language.


I book a ticket online and decide to go to Charing X Library to beat the rush for the books. On my way out I grab the book on the Vienna Woods serial killer I've finished and a novel I'd read ten pages of. I'd only picked it up in the library because the front said 'Short-listed for the Man Booker Prize 2005' The heroine's on a family holiday in a cottage in Norfolk, and she's a horrid little snob who keeps referring to everything as 'substandard' and contaminated because already used by other people. The chapters start with the second half of sentences, which seems a bit affected.



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Have managed to finish the first pass through the edits for Maloney's Law and sent it off to PD Publishing for their comments. I thoroughly enjoyed the experience too. It's also been hugely useful to go through it now, particularly bearing in mind its close relationship to The Bones of Summer. Which I probably won't be able to do any work on till at least February at this editing rate, but at least the memory of it is there! I hope ...

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