Across the border in the wild, wild country

Our first stop in Scotland was the Wee Restaurant, so called because, yes, it’s wee. Very wee. Tucked underneath a so-sleepy-it’s-practically-comatose village underneath the Forth Road Bridge where you would think the rumbling of the trains would keep the local populace awake, but out on the street there is barely a soul to be seen. They could all be dead. Gordon Brown lives here when not at No 11. 

I repeat. They could all be dead.

Inside the restaurant it’s a different story. It seats 24, but only if you are on elbow poking terms with your neighbours, and most of the diners, apparently, are. It’s packed. Red cheek to wobbly jowl. At the next table to ours are four white City women, two of whom are ‘weel at themselves’ which is Scottish for fat. They sit and swap finance tips, talking international bonds and markets the way those birds in Sex in The City discuss books and impotence. I’m terribly impressed and cowed, fairly falling into my bowl of mussels, until they start on about literature:

Oh you mustt have a favouritte author? Insists the pretty, thin one, annunciating her t’s with sharp Sth ‘Frican precision.

The fat white Kenyan one muses self-importantly like Rodin's The Thinker, then says in the tone of voice that heralds a Statement of Great Magnitude that her favourite book is the Anaed by Virgil. But it has a question mark at the end, so it sounds like a question. Maybe she’s unsure whether her companions, poor dears, have had a classical education.

It’s vary special, she says.

What's it about? asks Fat South African.

It's an epic poem, she says. That seems to be all she has.

Mmmm, say the others, nodding.

Silence.

Mmmm, they say again.

The Pretty girl then moves on to her next victim who is deer-in-the headlights stumped. Obviously every book she has never read has leapt over the fence and escaped into the forest and she just can’t think of anything to say, but relief floods across her face - EUREKA, Bambi's mother is down and she remembers one.

Rebecca, she clips, pronouncing it Ribika.

Aye rally lav that book, she adds.

Oooooh it’s a lavlie read, the others coo, such a lavlie book….

I’m thinking – it’s not lavlie, or even lovely – it’s a book about the Oedipus complex with strong lesbian homoerotic undertones, but they're talking about it like it's got Sunnybrooke Farm after the title.

The fat South African offers up Jane Oastin as her favourite author.

The others agree.

She’s rally special, says the pretty one. Rally, rally special.

Encouraged, the Fat South African elaborates: Oh…and Wuthering Heights… She’s written some lavely ones. I’ve seen all the ones on TV with the BBC up, you know?

I know.

I’ve gott itt, butt I haven’tt gott around tto reading itt yet. Says the Rebecca-lover (Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte NOT Jane Oastin, 1847 - what’s she waiting for….its 200th birthday?)

Then it was pretty girl’s turn.

Aye lav Sth American stuff. I rally enjoyed that book by Gabriel whatsisname… butt I can’tt remember the tatle. Itt’s a new one - it's just come outt. (note to readers Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera was published in 1985 - film released last month).

Aye well.

I could hardly drag my eyes off them to my beautifully frilled red mullet on its bed of butch purple broccoli . But somehow I managed.

Our next stop was Kirkaldy Farmers’ Market.

How do we get to Kirkaldy, asked Piers who was driving, bless him.

No it’s not Aldi like the supermarket it’s Awdy like Gawdy, I corrected him - by this point I'm turning into a real Slang Diction Bitch.

Yeah, whatever, so where is it? he asked (Such charm and grace the English).

The police man we stopped pointed in the same direction from which a large Pipe band was marching, so we parked and as the skirl of drums and pipes passed us by, I took the opportunity to wonder to myself what possible attraction as a weekend activity, beating a big drum with pom poms held for a very overweight woman on the wrong side of forty or an underfed girl of fifteen with piercings in her eyebrows and lips. Maybe I've answered my own question but it’s the having to wear white knee socks that would deter me, if nothing else.

The Farmers’ Market confused me. There was a stall selling:

Bratwurst, next to another selling
Salami, next to
Meats of the world, next to
Fromagerie chez Bertrand.

Then, in quick succession, one selling: Ponchos made of Llama wool, Nuts, Arabic Sweets, Savon de Provence, Pain de France, Gourmet coffee with fake hazelnut essence and Olives being sold by two men speaking loudly across the market to each other in eastern an European accent.

Bonjour says the greengrocer selling Spanish strawberries and French garlic to a man with a drinker’s nose and a North Face anorak while next to him there was a man in a full Indian Chief headdress, with pan pipes playing in the backgrounds flogging dream catchers, but with in broad Glaswegian.

Naw hen, this is the continental market, said a passer by when I asked. The Farmer’s market, an altogether much smaller affair was further up the road.

Just follie the pipe band, she said.

So we follied..

And there was the best of Fife and surrounding counties laid out before us – a fair smogarsboard of traditional local food: like, em.... Wild Boar,

and, diffident throat clearing, Buffalo.

Never in my life did I think I would hear a wee Scottish wifey in a headscarf and anorak asking a butcher if he had “any ordinary buffalo burgers?” When did buffalo start being ordinary in Scotland? Did I miss something? Where's the tatties and mince?

There was also venison, but even then it was burgured up for easy consumption and flavoured with everything from whisky to Irn Bru (actually I made the Irn Bru up - but it's only a matter of time).

Piers snapped a man in red tartan trousers standing in a smoke enveloped queue waiting to buy Arbroath smokies that were being cooked in a barrel next to the stall.

'You’re infringing that man’s human rights taking his photie like that,' said one of the women walking past in a herd like moody cows.

Aye Scotland - the land of the free - forget the highland clearances and give Amnesty International Political Prisoners Against Photography a call - a man had his photie taken without his knowledge. From the back.

Start the letter writing campaign to your MP now.

You know where Gordon lives...

Duty calls

Arrived at the airport in Edinburgh to do a job for Foodie magazine to find the photographer delayed and stuck in Gatwick until after lunch. I’m also stuck since I have lost my driving licence (as in can't find it, not have been caught joyriding up the M4 steering with my feet, lost it) this means that he’s doing the driving and I’m stranded without him. This isn’t so bad though as if I did have my license it would mean I would have to come back and collect him. I do enough chauffeuring as it is, without being in charge of Visit Scotland taxi service.

So nothing to do but wait.

And wait.

In the lounge waiting with me is a family with luggage piled higher than a Wendy's stack of pancakes, the cherry on the top a Louis Vuitton vanity case. The dad has on a big, once white polo shirt and has tattoos up both forearms. There’s a baby pink juicy handbag strung with dangling soft animals sitting on the chair next to him which I assume is for the little 12 year old girl, until the mother arrives, dyed blonde, face like a sour plum just turning into prune wearing jewelled jeans, jewelled watch and a visible thong who lifts it up and walks off with it. She’s about as juicy as a strip of rubber.

Then a blind man sits down next to me. I think he’s blind. Maybe he’s just wearing dark glasses and carrying a stick. He's certainly staring at my chest rather closely through the tinted shades.

I'm recovering from a busy week.  My friend Audrey came to London for a whirlwind visit of restaurants and theatre visits, which all had to be packed in before this trip:  The Halkin, Petrus, Speed the Plough with Kevin Spacey, dinner at the Ivy where I’m sure Prince Harry was a mere two tables away – or maybe it was just another Ginger boy – I mean they can't ALL be royal. Audrey recognised Joan Didion the writer who lives up the block from her sitting opposite us.   At work we are promoting one of our books called An Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life, leaving the book lying around London with a postcard on it, tied with Ribbon, saying, please read my book.

I left one in the Old Vic and one in the Ivy.

Not that there are many people living an ordinary life at the Ivy.

I wasn't having that much of an ordinary life myself.  I followed Audrey from restaurant to Spa where I had this treatment called sound therapy where you lie in the dark with earphones on and a bean bag on your eyes and  listen to ambient music and think of Brian Eno (or is that just me), but at the same time the bed vibrates in synch with the music and makes you think of Brian Eno (ditto) - a bit like when there’s really heavy base and you feel it reverberate in your chest.  It was wonderful apart from the fact that I longed to fall asleep and was afraid to incase I fell prey to embarrasing doggy snores. The rich, darling, don't snore - they merely exhale.

Loudly.

This was followed by God of Carnage and The Wolsely, and more copies of the book left artfully placed on banquettes.

And now, once the photographer arrives and sweeps me off to our secluded foodie hotel in the heart of Fife, more eating awaits me.

Sigh.

It is my duty to my country...

False notes

Post London Book Week, the office has returned to normal with the merry clank and hum of printers churning out manuscripts, the rapid tapping of keyboards, voices ringing out across the room, telephones ringing. I start to hum a sad song happily, as is my want when surrounded by the happy sounds of other people’s industry.

Imagine: isn’t it rich…are we a pair…me here at ….. (I've been watching the search for Nancy on BBC because I have no life) but hummed to the strains of mmm mmm m mmmmmmmmm…m m m mmmmmm…m m m

And then I go very quiet because I can’t hit the high notes, even when only mmming

But seamlessly, an editor across the room comes in with a lovely clear soprano (aha, she's been watching it too.  she has no life too, ha ha ha)

m m m mmmmmmmmmmmm, m m mm.

sings Mandy, who then whips out her guitar and…. No that’s a lie. Mandy does have a guitar and furtive mentions are made of Open Mic nights, which I think means playing an impromptu gig in a club, and not an affable Irishman, up for offers, but the guitar is nestling behind Mr T’s office door with his raincoat, though I do not think the two things are related.

Give us a song Mandy, we beg and we plead but nothing doing. Mandy refuses to strum her strings and turn the office into Club Karaoke. It’s just as well as I have a limited range, about as high as my heels, ie flat.

Mandy is visiting us from Down Under and has cast doubt on the sanity of all Australians by coming all this way to, well, sit in an office and work... I ask her where she’s off to next weekend.

'New York,' she says.

'It’s a wonderful town,' I respond.

'Yep, and the Bronx is up and the Bowery’s down….'

Ha ha ha ha ha.

Ah, the publishing life. Wit, song, and a laugh a minute.

The weekend that follows is an anticlimax.

Friday night I am treated to three verses and a chorus of * Off I Hate You, that old favourite so beloved of professional teenagers the whole world round. I wish I had the copyright, I could have made a fortune. I don't exactly know what great sin against humanity I have committed - it may have been something to do with mentioning room and vacuum cleaner in the same breath. I was told, rather luridly, that the whereabouts of the aforementioned household appliance, were in fact already known to the defendant, but I think I could be forgiven for not having known this since there is no evidence to back it up.

'Everybody in this house hates me' I'm reliably informed. Since it's only the teenager now that her father has left that doesn't carry as much weight as it did when it was awash with other children, nor, I add, is it much of a surprise. I could have it printed up on calling cards and hand it around when I introduce myself, or when we have guests.

'Oh yes, do come in, and let me take your coat, by the way, everyone in this house hates me, do have a seat.'

On Saturday I went to a birthday lunch for women only - no doubt the birthday girl is practicing for when all their husbands are dead and they are welcomed to my husbandless world with only each other to shore up our social life. I would rather have had it the other way round - all of the husbands and none of the wives.

Anyway there were twenty four of us, and I was the second youngest since another women with one of those soft, buttery Kensington voices beat me with 49 in May. Damn her.

The girlfriend who accompanied me, immediately latched on to one 'interesting' woman after another after announcing to me that she didn't want to sit next to me as she could 'talk to me anytime'. So I paddled in the shallows of:

'Oh really, and how many children do you have?'

'Fascinating - Laos you say? And when does Primula get back from her gap year?'

'And where did you say she went to school again?'

'Mmm Bristol University, laaaavely.'

This wasn't because it was all they had to talk about but more because I couldn't really compete with the 'early retirement academic' and 'television'. I tried to talk about 'being in publishing' but soon found myself admitting that I was someone's assistant and had only been doing it for three months.

Nevertheless, I did plug the book, and in turn listened to all the other yummy once-upon-a-time mummies plugging their own books (is there anybody out there NOT writing a book?) 

I did quite well until someone commented on the fact that she didn't recognise me since I had changed my hair colour (this is a frequent occurrence for two reasons, first because I often change my hair colour and second because I am so bloody inconspicuous and bland that if I go two shades lighter then immediately people thing they have never met me - it's the equivalent of the Harry Potter Cloak of Invisibility - if John Pilger had my gift he could just have bought a box of Clairol instead of going to the trouble of faking his own death). Yes, I've gone brown. There follows long conversation about it looking nice (her)  - you know, first class late night review stuff. I've got Mark Lawson, nodding knowledgeably along in my head.

There then followed some musical entertainment; a Roger Whittaker impressionist playing an accoustic guitar.

He asked for requests.

Finally, I thought. A sing song.  I was just about to ask for a nice rendition of Bye Bye Miss American Pie when...

'Fado?' said one.

'Any Bach?' asked another.

'What about Vaughn Williams?' Piped yet another.

All those over educated over achieving woman.  Damn them.  I bet they can't sing all the lyrics from The OC soundtrack.  I bet they think the OC is half a psychological disorder and not a cult teen drama.

Roger then played a Flamenco and some Segovia. And I finally, once and for all, just shut up.

London calling

It has been a week of excitements. I had an article published in The Times about my kids being on a gap year and hot on the heels of that, a radio interview in Ireland. Oh the heady world of international journalism… We broadcasters, you know, darling mwa mwa, just let me open the crackBerry to see if I can try to find a window so I can fit it all in.

Well first of all a nice girl with an oirish accent as strong as my Scottish one calls me up and has a ‘bit of a chat’ with me about my children’s gap year. And then they ring again for the interview - sorry but no, I am not whisked off to Bush house in a black cab to be put into a little sound proof room with earphones, instead, while I am at work but everyone else is at The London Book Fair, I am able to nip into a vacant office during the lunch hour and conduct my very important press conference while the girls in the Sales Office threaten to stand outside making wailing cat noises.

So, then different oirish accent comes on the line: Is that yourself, there, Marion.

Aye, it is indeed, there, Kevin, I nearly answered though unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your stance on these things) I don’t have the gift of the accent, so I did my usual growl and muttered something barely intelligible with a few ochs in it.

I then held on the line until the people in the studio had finished with the local news headlines;

jingle ....A story just in about the scandal in the Limerick Mental Hospital where a member of the public was able to go in to an asylum with a knife in a bag, and t'would seem this was just the tip of the oiceberg, I t'ink, said the news presenter. (Seems eminently sensible course of action to me - they are MAD those people in the asylum)...more jingles Radio Talk FM, Dublin (actually I don't know what it was called - I just made that up).

This was followed by another jingle then a nail-biting competition where the first five people to text in would win a 50 Euro unleaded petrol voucher. My finger was twitching…

Next, there was a call from a musician who had left his banjo in the back seat of a Dublin taxi, after a five hour gig at 4 o'clock in the morning (I think that drink may have had something to do with this oversight) appealing for its return.

I’m telling you...who needs Paxman?

Then it was my turn, but despite my agent telling me to plug the book, plug the book, darling, plug, plug, plug the book, darling, there wasn’t the opportunity. You could say that my role was something of a walk on part, which given that it was radio should illustrate something. Sadly I hardly got a word in edgeways because one of the other ‘guests’ Deirdre, whose kids, you and the rest of the Irish prime time commuters will be pleased to hear (at encyclopedic length), had a very successful gap year. To be sure, to be sure, it was like an episode of Father Ted but with me as the self-effacing Mrs Flynn, squeaking ineffectively in the background, drowned out by Deirdre.

Tea? Sure, you’d like a wee cup of tea, go on, go on, go on.

So I hung up and came back into the office and carried on with my work.

Reprise: Tea? Sure, you’d like a wee cup of tea, go on, go on, go on.

Actually nobody likes my tea at work. This is how you get them to stop asking you to make it for them.

In other news…

In the style of Bridget Jones. Words of Novel No 2 written: O.

Charity ends at home

I passed by my friend Sarah’s house looking for the choo choo cake pan I lent her in February. This, my dears, is the sort of thing I do in the evenings, and I leave you to imagine what possible use I intend to make of a cake pan shaped like a train when there is no-one in the house younger than 16. What is even more disturbing is that Sarah claims to have returned the cake pan to me and therefore, not only am I a woman who bakes novelty cakes, but I am a woman with the memory of a hen who bakes novelty cakes. I can’t remember getting it back, nor have I even the foggiest idea where an 18” square lump of silicone covered mould could be in my kitchen. It’s not as though it could hide undetected amongst the, I’m hanging my head in shame now, other seven similarly large novelty cake pans (the honey-bee, the castle, the Easter bunny, etc) that are in the cupboard.

But while we were standing talking about disintegrating marriages (mine) and absentee work-too-much husbands (hers) on her doorstep (as you do) she gave me a look I haven’t seen before, a measured, wary, one step backwards glance as though she was expecting me to burst into flames, or worried that I might do something else, equally unpredictable, like melt. I think this is what lunatics must feel like when they’ve recently left the asylum after filling the bath with curry powder and trying to boil it with a three bar electric fire (no don’t look at me – that was Martin in Account’s ex-flat mate). Not pity, but sympathy, and something else, trepidation maybe, a fear that marriage break ups are catching.

And then I catch sight of the Academics next door who are also friends of mine, and through which, at a party at their house, I met Sarah. They are sitting huddled together in front of a computer screen, Mrs Academic’s hennaed hair an auburn corona around her little kitten face. I wonder if I should wave, and before the thought gets a chance to reach my brain, I have lifted my hands and she has seen me. Within seconds she and Mr Academic have bounded outside to say hello. And there is the same look – three sets of guarded smiles and nervous laughs.

I’m an emotional invalid. They don’t know what to say to me.

It makes me slightly paranoid. As though they might know something even worse about my life than I do, like a terminal diagnosis for something I still imagine is only psychosomatic – as though they are about to break really, really bad news. Maybe the ex's girlfriend is pregnant with twins and I'm the last to know.

They insist that I come in, and so I follow them into their lovely, shambolic, crowded 1950s style kitchen with the Ikea table that they bought ten years ago at the same time as we did ours, and then distressed by banging it with hammers and shoes so that it would lose its shiny new look. It has lost its shiny new look now and blends in perfectly with the rest of the odd rickety chairs and mismatched Middle Eastern pottery. We're oth distressed these days. They don’t ask me to sit down and so we stand there awkwardly floundering in the middle of the room, me making more amusing remarks and them ha ha haing, whilst we all feel deeply uncomfortable, and they look at me trying not to pity.

'You’ve lost weight,' says Mrs Academic.

'Yes, well, the stress diet, you know – the divorce diet, whatever, I say,' then I paraphrase that line in The Devil Wears Prada and add:' I’m only one trip to India away from my ideal weight.'

HA HA HA this gets a big laugh.

After about two hundred years I say I need to go, and they grasp the statement with relief, like it was a knotted sheet and I was the fire.

Poor souls. They are trying hard to be kind. I appreciate it. It's not that I don't need their charity. I just wish it was easier to accept.

The funniest things pop up all of a sudden

I’m in a book club.

Okay, big surprise.

I know, it’s not like admitting that I am a member of a Civil War Re-enactment Society or go to Star Trek Conventions. Pretty standard, tick the box sort of stuff for middle class women of a certain age who don’t take lovers and therefore have to find something else to do with their evenings.

I used to be in The Power Book Club. This was many years ago when I was a housewife, mother of four, and general all round drudge. Why I was included in this book club was an even bigger mystery than why women are in book clubs at all (apart from the fact that lovers, though more fun, come with nasty side-effects like divorce and heartache and, according to the Daily Mail, Chlamydia). They were all so clever and successful: Anne Marie (thin), an academic, who talked in italics, paranthesis and footnotes all the time despite coming from Kircaldy. Sarah (thin), fantastically glamorous Travel Magazine editor. Louise (thin) fantastically glamorous Fashion Magazine editor. Wendy (thin) fantastically glamorous Journalist and her colleague Betsy (really, really thin) fantastically glamorous and even more senior Journalist. Nina (really, really thin to the point of bony-ness) fantastically glamorous Politician’s Speech Writer.

So you are sensing a trend here.

The kind of women, in short, with degrees from Ivy League universities who make you feel you should have been drowned at birth or left on a hillside to die, except that, there need to be some women around to look after their kids, and they can’t all come from Guatemala.

I was invited along by my friend Julia, fantastically glamorous PR Guru, for reasons best known to herself (possibly having something to do with the fact that her boyfriend, at the time, and I both hailed from the same part of the world and therefore bonded over a common language: we sat and growled och aye at each other, and laid into the bevy. Marrrryin he used to call me).

Whatever her logic, I was included in this magic circle of high-achieving women who have all gone on to even greater heights on Editorial Mastheads, published books, and had children, while I, erm, have taken over the reigns as an assistant at Pedantic Press where all those consonants give my och aye accent a lot of trouble. I have to say it slooooowly, forcing myself to ‘annunciate´.

It’s a tough job, but I think I rise to the challenge.

In between I have been a journalist, a food writer, a restaurant critic, a sex columnist, and penned all sorts of spurious and frivolous articles and 'gift' books (that unfortunately nobody gifted) as well as a couple of children’s books - but let us not rest on our past glories when others’ current glories are veritably blotting out the sun so that our own wee glories, starved of light, wither and die.

But you’ve got the novel, I hear you scream. Don’t forget the novel.

No, indeed, I have not forgotten the novel, in fact the Coca Cola sign in my head is flashing on and off and on and off in the Piccadilly Circus of my psyche, but unfortunately it seems to be invisible to the rest of the population, which, I suppose, is the problem with imaginary neon signs.

Julia is still my friend, amazingly, and about to write a book herself, so I don’t suppose mine is much of a boast. She is tossing off one now about 'juggling' kids and board meetings.

So I can't think what the attraction is.

Maybe she thinks I am nice.

Ha ha ha ha ha.

Anyway, having told you all about the Power Book Club, I shall now make all of the previous chapters redundant by telling you that it has now disbanded and I am, therefore, no longer a member. All other members have gone on to slam dunk success while I am hiding in the changing room. From being the only mother, now Julia is writing a self help books for mothers and didn't ask me to contribute (whimper) and Wendy is now uncovering the horrors of Saddam's Iraq and will soon be such a hot property we will be dropping her name at parties. Both books are being published by Pedantic Press, where, ahem, I answer the phone.

Nobody ever remembers my name at parties. Not even if I've slept with them. Hell, not even if I've married them.

I am however still friendly with la belle Julia who, this evening , is taking me to ‘her club’ for supper.

I was remembering this important date in my otherwise empty diary when I rose this morning and dressed in the big girl jeans (note to self - remember to change later), trainers (definitely remember to change later) and socks, no - I stand, hopping, corrected. That should have said: sock, as I can’t find the other one of the matching pair of black ‘pop’ socks (nothing to do with music, spontaneity or general approval, but that’s what they are called – I don’t name em folks, I simply report) that I put on last night after my bath. There is one on the floor, but the other has gone out for a packet of fags, met up with a marauding band of assorted dark ribbed socks and vanished.  Oh well, never mind. I'll get another pair. I find a dark gray sock and a navy sock in the orphan sock bag – almost from the same colour spectrum, and set off to ride the bus to work.

So Power Book Club – defunct. Keep up – there is a point to this long monologue. But, fear not, I am still in a book club.

Oh really?

Yes, since you ask, Currently, however, I am a member of The Power Book Club's antonym – otherwise known as The Weight Watchers Book club.

By me, anyway.

Here, the members are slightly, or even, in some cases (me) Marina Rinaldi, overweight, and the meetings are a tad more concerned with the food than the fiction. We are all friends from decades of standing outside school gates awaiting children who were once-upon-a-time friends but who now can’t stand each other. We are the ones who maintain our friendships, forged over hours and hours and days and weeks of park times while various small boys kicked various small objects (often other, younger, smaller boys) up and down a muddy field.

Of course, they do other things too. They are all professionals with a couple of former corporate high flyers thrown in for good measure, but none of us quite has the Power Sisters patina of Success stamped on us like the LV on a trophy handbag.

That doesn’t mean that some members (not me) are not jaw-crunchingly grand, you know with dogs and 4x4s and Agas and places in the ‘cuntry’ and organic boxes in the corner of their hand-built kitchens and kids away at boarding school, one such being the lovely Jenny.

She’s quite, quite posh. Very well-brought-up. Very married. Very sweet. Clever too. And slim and perfect looking, not loose and large like the rest of us. And she dresses in a sort of sloaney mufti, like Kirsty Alsop on weekends but without the Alice band - jeans and navy blue jumpers, little white collar peeping shyly from the neck and pearls. Okay, maybe I’m imagining the pearls.

So we are sitting at a Weight Watcher’s Book Club some time last year. We are in one member’s house: Millionaire, hand-embroidered antique tablecloth hanging over the chimney breast that her husband decided to demolish some months earlier and then left, radiator in the middle of the sitting room, unconnected, freezing, using the wood frame he half-built inside the chimney breast as fuel for the fire... West London intellectuals. You get the picture.

We have spent the usual requisite ten minutes on the book and have moved on to weightier matters like husbands (annoying) ex-husband (spawn of the devil), kids (even more annoying) dogs (lovely/annoying depending on class) food, dinners, meals, ingredients, more food (fattening but really lovely), when Nel looks under the table and says to Jenny: 'Oh, is that yours?'  She is gesturing to the hankie on the floor.

Jenny glances down, and says: No I don’t think so, and the conversation continues: Ottolenghi, Tavola, Clarke's, Tom’s, Mr Christians etc… (all names of West London delis).

Then suddenly Jenny looks again, yips, reaches to the floor and says:

'Oh my Gawd, yes, this is mine,' bends down and produces…

no, not a hankie...

but a pair of

... knickers.

Yesterday’s knickers, to be exact, which had lodged in the leg of her jeans that she had worn the day before and hurriedly dressed in that morning.

What a woman. So perfect and human too. I liked her SO much more at that moment.

I thought of that story fondly this morning as I stood up to be catapulted, as usual from the top deck of the bus, somewhat like bunjee jumping but without the rope. to the bottom deck (usually slamming my face into the wall as I go) when there, right there, on the stairs, I espied

Wait for it…

Drum roll…

…a single black pop sock, just lying there, deflated on the middle step, where it had wriggled from my jeans, presumably, as I boarded the bus in West London.

So this is where all the odd socks in the world go.

Stowing away in the leg of lazy women's jeans, off to the London Review of Bookshop to meet like-minded individuals with a fondness for Rilke and ceramic cats.

A mystery solved.

I just thought I would share that with you.

By the way. Of course I picked the sock up and put it in my pocket.

It was one of a matching pair for God's sake.

How to get a head in publishing

Monday morning.

Yesterday’s snowstorm a memory prompted by the wind which is arctic and biting. I plod, boot shod and lycra tighted up to my well insulated chest, merrily (a too much coffee/caffein high masquerading as happiness - I can't tell the difference), all the way to work where what would be a pleasant empty in-box awaits me, if only the lack of pressing tasks did not allow me time to catch up with one of my least favourite parts of the receptioning life: The slush pile.

At Pedantic Press we have a strictly no unsolicited submissions policy. In effect, this policy means absolutely nothing as most of the people of send us unsolicited submissions cannot read.

Neither can they spell.

Nor can most of them write.

When I started working here I was full of empathy and sorrow every time I composed a rejection letter, as you would expect from someone who has, in her time, been the recipient of more than a few rejection letters.

Well, in fact, I haven’t had that many rejection letters. That’s what you pay the agent for – or rather that’s what you don’t pay the agent for, since they only get paid when you do, but in the interim, while they are churning out photocopies of the magnum opus and schlepping it around the hushed halls of London Publishers, they are the ones who get to read the thanks, but go * yourself letters.

But still, I was full of empathy.  In fear of some sort of nasty Karmic payback, I even offered advice, and in some cases, encouragement.

This was a VERY bad idea.

Writing back to putative authors who have just sent you a letter written entirely in lower case, detailing their ‘character’s’ aka 'my' descent in drug addiction and raise (sic) back up to recovery, is always a VERY bad idea.

‘Don’t enter into any sort of dialogue with them, for God’s sake. You’ll never get rid of them,’ counselled one wild-eyed, hunched, hunted colleague after another.

‘Remember Emma?’ They said nodding darkly… She was always nice to them.’ They shudder. Emma is now doing a rehabilitation course in elementary Victoria sponges. Dark tales of them, especially the 'Northern' one, were then whispered in hushed voices round the office.

I inherited the Northern one.

I was warned.

But did I listen? Oh no. I responded nicely seven times to the mad American who sent me her manuscript of Snakes in a Plane without the snakes until I eventually - on email number 9 - snapped and told her to hiss off.   Then she responded by telling me I was unprofessional.  Me?  Unprofessional? Of course I am.  Anyone more professional wouldn't be reading the slush.  And then, as predicted by my colleagues, after telling one of my early rejectees that he ‘certainly had a snappy style’ but that his first step should be to find an agent, he immediately responded asking me for the name of one, preferably mine.

I did not reply – look our web site says ‘any submissions sent to us will not be read and will not be returned’. He was already ahead on points by getting a polite letter in the first place. However, a month later my agent (high up the alphabet so early in the trip down Agent Directory Lane) told me that someone had written to her saying that ‘Marion at Pedantic Press’ had said that he ‘certainly had a snappy style’.

The poor wretch had not realised that Moron, I mean Marion at Pedantic Press was merely one rung up the ladder from the Ecuadorian cleaner, and  that her recommendation was not quite of the calibre of an Isobel Allende quote slapped on the dustjacket of the book.

So for all wannabe authors out there, let me spell out a few publishing tips:

1.   Just because you’ve written a book doesn’t mean that anyone wants to read it. Publishing is a business. You might find your great grandmother fascinating and really prize her collection of antique dentures, novelty braces and belt buckles, but just because she was the first woman in Sheffield to switch from zips to Velcro does not automatically qualify her as a 3 for 2 read in Waterstone's. This is why self-publishing exists. Lulu.com is a fantastic invention for those intent on seeing their name in print without having to murder someone or get their name on the Paedophile Register to put it there (strangely there is a significant number of people on the slush pile who seem to have done both). It would have been my own next step in my literary career (Lulu.com not murder) if those nice people at Waddling Duck hadn’t plucked me from the remainder shop of life.

2. If you are going to send an unsolicited manuscript to a publisher.

Don’t.

3. If you absolutely insist on sending an unsolicited manuscript remember that some capitalisation and punctuation is helpful, particularly full stops and an upper case ‘i’ as in the book what ‘i’ am writing. Using green ink, red paper or block capitals to attract attention works, but only in a Care in the Community sort of way.

4. If you absolutely insist on sending an unsolicited manuscript and your letter is beautifully composed and spell-checked, even if you send a stamped addressed envelope, you may still not get a reply or your manuscript read. Hint: I am the receptionist and yet I get the job of rejecting the slush pile. How far down the pecking order does that make the stuff on the pile?  No, it's not because we are callous horrible people, it's because we have already paid a great deal of money for the manuscripts that we do intend to publish and everyone is working overtime to deal with those.

5. When you buy The Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook, The Writers’ Handbook, The Writer’s Market or some other similar publication, go to the section marked AGENTS not PUBLISHERS.

6. What do you mean you have never heard of The Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook?

7. I said do not go to the section marked PUBLISHERS. Do you think I’m making this stuff up?

8. Okay, since you insist. Do you see that bit under the publisher’s entry where it says: ‘We do not accept any unsolicited manuscripts?’ Guess what. It means they do not accept any unsolicited manuscripts. Not even if they are brilliant. Not even if you are Hillary Mantel pretending to be a raw young talent so that you can write an article in The Daily Mail on the stupidity of publishers. Hillary Mantel would not write for the Daily Mail, I’m sure, but that’s beside the point. Not even if the unsolicited manuscript you want to send in  is ‘a thrilling romance between raven haired gypsy from the foothills of the Alps (I kid you not) and the mysterious Count Fuckula, set between the magical island of Corfu, Paris, New York and Solihull’.

9. Despite the use of the word ‘unsolicited’, you should not infer that there exist manuscripts (except those by Hillary Mantell, perhaps) that are ‘solicited’. Publishers are not known for standing around street corners asking passing writers if they are ‘looking for business’. Publishers are like adolescent boys, desperate for sex but afraid of having it forced on them by the wrong people, like their mother’s best friend auntie Cynthia. In this case you are auntie Cynthia.

10. And no, ‘unsolicited’ does not mean that you should write nicely and ask first, though it is preferable to sending all 600 pages enclosed in individual plastic folders each with a word count. Writers of unsolicited manuscripts are obsessed with word count. What this phrase really means is that they want a nice, reliable, credible literary agent who may or may not be on first name terms with one of the editors, to have looked at it first, decided it was an undiscovered literary genius and ideal for them, and sent it along. And even then there is a Andean mountain range of manuscripts falling out of every office, full of words of genius most of which, they just can’t publish because the market isn't large enough. Apparently the majority of the Great British reading public is out there writing books about their nervous breakdowns and life as a rent boy instead of walking along to their friendly local bookstore and buying them.

11. And finally, if you’ve written several other Vampire novels set in a nihilistic world sometime in the future, do not include all the synopses (together with their word count, of course) which have not been published, these do not have quite as much allure as you might imagine. Futile productivity and a previous track record of failure is not something prospective publishers look for in an author. If you were internet dating and wrote in your profile that this was the sixteenth dating site that you had joined without meeting anyone, who do you think would want to go out with you?

12 - 100 Get an agent.

No really.

Get an agent.

Easier said than done, I know.  But, still:

Get an Agent.

Okay, I know, dear fellow novelist, this is not very hopeful or really very helpful advice, and it’s true that you might expect more sister solidarity from one who has toiled at the typewriter in vain and who was told by the first agent she approached to give up and forget about it because my book would never get published - but, I don’t make the rules. I’m just telling you how it is.

And frankly, with my own book coming out soon - providing that literary agents are not always right - I don’t need the competition.

Nobody ever said I was the nurturing sort.

Not even my mother.

Come to think of it, especially not my mother.

(1579 words)

The economics of publishing

I'm tapping away at work, licking the envelopes at the cutting edge of publishing

...when the phone rings.

It’s my agent, piping down the line in her Captain of Lacrosse accent, that she just wants to remind me, 'darling,' that I’m a 'novelist, not a receptionist,' but her words fall on switchboard-deafened ears. I’m already in full receptioning mode: 'Good Morning, Pedantic Press, how can I help you?' I drone, showing the same sort of enthusiasm for the call that Virginia Woolf had for life belts.

There’s a meeting on. A planning meeting. Everybody else in the company is in it, planning, except me, who is sitting Cinderella-like, at my desk, playing forts with boxes of padded envelopes and reams of sticky labels, sending out somebody else’s work of genius to the great and the good-for-a-quote of literary London, fielding telephone calls, one after the bloody other like tennis balls being fired at me from one of those automatic machines.

It should be added that no-one who has ever seen me totter for a bus would ever think that tennis was my game, so though my words might be straight for Stepford Secretarial School, the desperation in my voice is pure Sauchihall Street.

‘You sound frazzled,’ she trills.

‘Just a tad.’

I’d just fielded a call from a terminally bored literary agent who haughtily asked for the lovely Ubereditor without any preamble, salutation, apology or thanks, as though tossing fish at a performing seal and expecting me merely to bark, clap my flippers, and put him through immediately, arphing deferentially at the sound of his gilded name.

Arf, Arf, Arf.

Agents can be rather annoyingly grand, unless they are your own, in which case they are Gods.

'So, Where’s the next novel, darling?'chirps my Queen of Fifteen Percent - and worth every penny of it, she is. I needed some reminding that I am a mistress of letters, and not the sort you put through the freaking franking machine.

'I've just handed in the last one,' I plead.

Yes, she knows. She tells me she has just read the blurb from my publisher’s catalogue and starts reciting little bits of it. She 'loves the new title, darling. They’ve got you compared to Jodi Picoult,' she crows. 'Imagine!' Yeah, if only.

I make happy noises and vow to come home, open the file on my laptop marked Maggie, in which my heroine has been trapped in Novel No 2, standing on the threshold of a house in Chelsea where she is about to engage in frantic illicit sex with a man called Bruno or Marco or Luca (I can’t make up my mind – since ER started again, I’m heavily leaning towards Luca) but who I have not been able to move up the stairs yet. She’s been there since last October, drunk, reckless, ready to drop her clothes in a pool at the door but she still hasn’t done the deed. I think it’s safe to say she isn’t that keen. Nor am I. I want to say, don’t do it love. Keep your knickers on and go home. It’s not worth it.

It was different last time. Then the hero was pure wish fulfilment, but rent-an-Italian...?  Ach, not so much. I’ve known this hero in various guises for five years or more. It’s gone beyond infatuation to boredom and indifference. I still haven’t forgiven him for disappearing with 65,000 of his fellow words on the study floor when I dropped my computer and smashed him to smithereens, destroying my hard disk and half the novel four years ago. Now I’m rewriting, and trying to work up enough enthusiasm to allow him to seduce me away from my life as West London Shop Girl where my heroine this time round has been dusting since Chapter 2 in September, but I’m not so sure any more. Life has taken the romantic shine off the allure his shabby, crushed, straight from central casting, hack’s raincoat. Reality has sandpapered the glossy varnish off adultery and extra marital sex. And so, my heroine loiters in the pebbles of his front garden, more interested in the planted terracotta pots and the neutral colours of his hall, than the prospect of sleeping with him.

He’s lost his lustre. He’s the one who needs polishing up a little.

But full of resolve I come home on the No 7 bus lolling to and fro like an Asian potentate atop a stately elephant, lumbering down Oxford Street, and revisit the plot all the way to Suburban Terraces, then fall down the stairs at my stop – who knew that getting off a London bus these days counts as a extreme sport.

Inside the house, though there is no husband there is, nevertheless, human life.

I find the cleaner blinking at me mutely in the hall like one of those nocturnal marsupials - mute because she only speaks Portuguese and I don’t, but no words are necessary - I understand what she’s saying. She’s speaking the universal language of  I need money,  in which my kids are fluent.  She hasn’t been paid. We usually communicate the finer points of cleaning vocabulary using Babel Fish on the PC:

eg: please clean the oven: limpe por favor o forno (or so you hope - Babel Fish has a habit of mistranslating to, often, hilarious and embarrasing effect)

...but the computer is equally mute and disconnected from the internet thanks to her routine unplugging of every electrical appliance in the house.

I look around for a bundle of fivers, but there is nothing.

Damn the real life ex-husband. At least fictional Rent-an-Italian, would surely have a wad of bills stuffed into the pockets of that hack’s raincoat.

I mime that I am leaving and will be back in a minute using a VERY LOUD VOICE to compensate for my lack of Portuguese which the cleaner pretends she understands, while wincing at the volume, then rush across to the cash machine in the Tibetan Off License, where I withdraw £50 that I immediately hand over on my return.

This, you see, is the reason for all the receptioning. In order to have enough time not to write, I get to sit at my desk in Pedantic Press and answer the phone all morning, then come home and give my wages over to the woman who cleans my house while I am out answering the phone all morning.  I fear, however, that the economics of the venture may be somewhat flawed. Especially since only one of us is paying tax.

Now I really should turn on my laptop and get my heroine up those stairs and into bed.

But, nah, the house is so clean it’s like it has been licked.

So I do what any other self-respecting ex-wife in a clean house would do.

Rather than mentally seducing a fictional lover, I leave the heroine deadheading geraniums in that house in Chelsea, make a sandwich and watch the episode of ER that I missed last night on Channel 4 On Demand.

Ah, if only everything in life were as easy to have On Demand.