'Asthma never goes away,' I told him, 'Not if you don't use the medication to fight it - fresh air isn't going to do it Musician.'

I switched off from his ideas, not wanting to hear the feeble answers for neglect. Thank God the doctor gave him a bollicking, and kept him in; that was a first, along with the canula in his hand; that little tap on his blood. He complained about it, and the time we'd had to wait. I shouldn't still have to be this mother, to a thirty year old man. Why don't I have a son who can cope with his own small space in the world? Another fault of mine, I supposed.

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I’ve been dipping into another old handbook on forensic medicine. This one is by Johann Ludwig Casper. It’s called A Handbook of the Practice of Forensic Medicine, and it was translated into English by George William Balfour. The third edition, which is the one I’ve been referring to, dates from 1861 and is freely available on google books.

Now and then, I’m asked about the developments in forensic science, and whether my decision to write historical crime fiction had anything to do with an antipathy towards modern crime solving technology. When a crime can be solved by a DNA sample, what role is there left for the old-fashioned detective to play?

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Trust a drummer to know about silence. Over on Radio 3's Private Passions last Sunday, Stewart Copeland, late of The Police and more recently not unknown to opera houses, was talking to his fellow composer Michael Berkeley. I'm saving his comment, about how the beauty went out of modern music when it became an algorithm rather than a sentiment, for my official rant about what might happen to academic creative writing as it finally follows music into universities. But he said so much else which made sense to me as a writer.

The thing about drummers (I've a feeling he'd refuse to be called a percussionist) is that although all music exists in time, percussion has no sustaining pedal, no lungful of air, no length of a bow, to hold the note. Neither, of course, do words: once a word is said or read, it's over. Poets get closest, because they can assume that we'll hear the sounds as well as the sense, and with both we'll try to do the overlapping, the chords, the echoes, the harmony and the counterpoint, for ourselves, if only by re-reading the poem. But we prose writers have to assume that our readers' experience is nothing else but reading one word after another to the end: we have to earn our re-reading.

And so, Copeland said, just as visual artists work with negative space, the arts which work by putting one beat/word/foot in front of the other work also work with silence and stillness.

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I finished Heaven Can Wait by Cally Taylor last night. It isn't the usual thing I'd read in that it's a romantic comedy, but blimey, I'm glad I did.

Lucy Brown dies the day before her wedding to her soulmate. In limbo she's given the opportunity to either head on up to heaven and be reunited with the parents she lost while still very young, or head back down to earth as a wannabe ghost to complete a task which, if completed, would allow her to become an actual ghost and be reunited with her beloved fella.

I'm glad Lucy Brown chose option 2. The task she's set is to find love for a geek.

I've just nipped over to The Book Depository for the above picture of the cover. They say, about Heaven Can Wait, that it's a 'fabulously warm, funny and romantic novel, that will have you laughing and crying in equal measure'. and I couldn't agree more.

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While I waited I looked at the programme, with its alluring question on the cover:'Have you heard the Angels sing?'. Inside there was summary in Spanish of the lives of Purcell and Vivaldi, and the words in Spanish and English to the five settings of psalms by Purcell and then a Latin text for the Vivaldi ‘Dixit ….’ There was a short ‘sonata de trompeta’ between Purcell psalms. It was a hollow-sounding instrument of a dull copper colour, like an over-sized Victorian child’s toy.


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Apparently, over eight million viewers tuned in to watch this week’s Question Time and the appearance of Nick Griffin, leader of the British National Party. This is an unprecedented number, particularly at a time when the public’s appetite to hear politicians say anything about anything is at an all time low.

I watched it eagerly myself, though I’m not sure why. Griffin sat like an over ripe Brie, all round, sweaty and unpalatable, while the politicians around him postured with a worthiness of a student union debate circa 1985. Maggie, Maggie, Maggie, out, out, out...





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I had lunch with Oracle today – well it was really a kind of early supper. We love to sit in Peckham’s and graze a cheese board once a month, with an assortment of drinks; latte, Earl Grey, water, pear cider, coke. Fabulous way to sift through a very late afternoon, though now the clocks have changed, it was dark when we left.

‘Ooh, I’m out in the city in the dark!’ I said.



He had a new toy, which he showed off; we poured over this beautifully flat and smooth iPod Touch.

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'Articulate' and 'eloquent' are often used interchangeably to mean 'convincing with words,' but there's an important difference between the two terms. To convey an idea effectively you need to be articulate; but only eloquence can achieve emotional resonance. Eloquence requires a fluency in the language of feelings, an understanding of the simple means by which one human being connects with another, and owes more to empathy than to vocabulary.

Take last Thursday's BNP-bash. To my mind, Sayeeda Warsi was by far the most articulate of the guests - yet it was Bonnie Greer who proved the most popular.

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Does sexuality govern how we write? As writers, do our preferences enslave us?

Our desires bend us in certain ways and every experience spills onto the page, coloured by our own personal wants.

Dreams really do shape reality.

This question popped into my head while writing Unrequited, this notion that while I was writing something personal (and no doubt, unmarketable) in terms of gay relationships, it was, at heart, only an unveiling of experience. Perhaps that’s all writing is, coaxed and prodded to within an nth of the make-believe, that capricious landscape that we call Fiction. But all Fiction has its roots in Truth. Would I have written graphic gay sex scenes if I were straight?

Doubtful. Or so I thought at the time.



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So, after having two guest posts here about writing and where you are, and how the two mix, I've finally written my thoughts on how it was to move countries and what that has done to my words, over at Petina Gappah's excellent blog. An extract:

So we moved, with our two cats (who are now, sadly and cruelly, in quarantine), two months ago. And that is when the culture shock hit. Yes, I had been back often on holiday. But something shifted inside me, knowing that this wasn't a short trip, and I found that I couldn't get through a whole sentence in English without stopping to search for a word. After 15 years, there were gaps in my English that I would have filled in in Hebrew. (I like to think this bilingualism made my fiction more "innovative"!)

..........

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