From my postbag

It has been almost a week since my last confession.

This is due, in part, to the fact that though I do have sins to confess, there's scant chance of me coughing them up here, and so I'm silenced, struck dumb by discretion which, by nature, I'm not good at. All this leaves my weekend a bit of a crime scene which I dare not approach - much like my sitting room in which there is still a large bite missing from the ceiling, protected by a milimetre of polythene and supported by black gaffer tape which is apparently supposed to stop the rest of it falling down. It seems safer to keep away from both areas altogether. I can't sit down in comfort and I can't spill the beans. Damn it, it's annoying.

So, instead, I turn to my postbag and my speciality - unsolicited manuscripts which, despite the website disclaimer, people continue to send in to us, usually addressed to the Senior Editor, The History Editor, The Fiction Editor or even The Editorial Director.

Dear Prospective Writers,

I am sorry to disabuse you of the notion that your manuscript will ever reach these people who, in some cases, don't even exist. If you are going to submit an unsolicited manuscript and clearly haven't bothered to take the time to look at our submission criteria, wouldn't it occur to you that if we were indeed to go to the trouble of plucking your work from amongst the many tales of alien abduction, sexual abuse and gay bear/twink erotica, and publish it, then it might behove you to invest the effort to find out the name of the person you should approach?

Of course, the people who are pay-grade appropriate with the power to publish your book don't often open their own post and so still wouldn't see it, and if you did ring up to ask their name you with would only hear me tell you, with real sympathy, honest, that there was no point in sending in an unsolicited manuscript because we don't accept them.

However, the point still stands. Poor research already handicaps you and my way, you'd save yourself the postage, at least.

'But I'm a published writer,' you might say.

'So, you must have an agent?'

'No, but I have written several books for East Kent County Council.'

'I'm afraid you still need to try and find an agent.'

'But I can't get an agent.'

Yes, I know, it's horrible. I have been you. Finding an agent is not easy. But just because one turns you down, it doesn't mean they all will. A friend has been trying for years and on her third unpublished novel found a wonderful girl who took her on immediately. I myself was told by the first agent I approached that I should just give up and not bother. Nobody would ever publish my book, he said. It had nothing going for it, no plot and no voice. I cried for three days. Unhappily, it was not the last time I cried. And when I did find an agent, Praise Be Her Name which, no, don't bother asking, I'm not sharing, I was turned down by absolutely everybody, and their assistant assistant's work-experience A level student (a weekend sobbing on the bathroom floor in a posh hotel in Oxford) and - read this and weep with me - this included Pedantic Press itself, who said no twice.

This fact my agent felt driven to reminisce with me over lunch today as she raised a glass of champagne to my imminent publication: 'All those rejections!' she said gleefully, and then her lips started to move but since I had my fingers in my ears whilst humming softly to myself and rocking, I didn't hear her elaborate.

Agents. You can't live without them and you can't shoot them in the head, however, getting something published without one is almost impossible.

And pretty *ing difficult with one.

Believe me, I feel your pain.

I also realise, as a recent correspondent, pointed out (in this somewhat unequal salutation in which a Sir is the equivalent rank of a Ms) that with the policy of only accepting manuscripts from literary agents that we are also:

I love the 'these agents' part (you can hear the lip curl) though I'm not quite sure what they have to do with the present recession. Poor things, you can't blame them for everything - they're not the freemasons. The same correspondent then goes on to warn us that by refusing to accept unsolicited manuscripts we have ruined our chances of discovering another:

"Kafka or JK Rowlin"

This may also, sadly, be true.

However, when you consider that most of the letters that accompany submissions look more or less like this:

I think you'll agree that should another Kafka appear, we might just be able to pick him out from the dross. I mean, dividing submissions into those who can spell and those who write notations and/or illustrations for flying machines in the margins, immediately narrows down the field. However,if the loonies would only stop cluttering up the in-trays maybe publishers would be more inclined to be lenient with their strictly no submissions policy.

A recent addition to our complaints section (another of my esteemed duties) has been the following:

Oh dear.

The 'dreaded' sticker. Who pray dreads the sticker?

I'm so sorry that some readers don't like it, but speaking as a first time novelist, I'd walk naked through a car wash for one of those prized stickers. I'd say print it on, stick it on, emboss it on the cover instead of of my name, just remove the cover and put a ruddy big RICHARD AND JUDY medallion on the front and drench the whole thing in Galaxy chocolate and all I would do is cheer loudly while handing out big fat cigars to all my friends and grovelling on my knees to the good God of Increased Sales.

For every discerning lover of literature who objects to joining the Richard and Judy charabang, there are are significantly more readers who pick up the book on the basis of the recommendation and so extend the reach of a book's potential readership. The author is happy. The publisher is happy. The reader, who has discovered a cracking good read, is also happy. It's a win-win situation...

erm, except for the people who don't want the embossed endorsment to sully their reading pleasure and those unlucky individuals in the publishing houses and bookstores who have to stick all the stickers on the books.

I leave you with the final words of our disgruntled Catch 22 correspondent who, after a long rant on what is wrong with publishing, signs himself:

I assume he sees himself in terms of the Watergate Scandal (with England added just in case we thought he was an informant in Washington, duh!) and not the Linda Lovelace film.

But there's no way to be absolutely sure.

(Probably a good thing.)

Chicken Licken

After watching Obama being sworn in as President of the Free World, I had a drink with a new friend at The Electric which seemed the perfect thing to be doing on a cold Tuesday night in January and I had been looking forward to it with ridiculous levels of excitement.

'So is it a date?' asked one of the office Indians.

'No, it's a drink,'

'So it's a non-date, date.' She persisted.

'It's just a drink.' I said definitively. Lest we not forget I am a woman admired for her mind.

And in case the message needed to be hammered home, Claudia Schiffer was leaving the club as I arrived, a child in fairy wings on one hip, and upstairs in the bar a few other yummy mummies were shepherding offspring out of the door after what was obviously a West London birthday party of a sprog of the rich, groomed and famous. One of them was Mariella Frostrup but since I’m not the most plugged in of spot the sleb players, hers was the only face I recognised. In any case, I was much too busy using my startlingly sharp mind to dazzle my companion who sat so far away from me that we were practically using semaphore to communicate as he huddled further and further inside the depths of his chair (that keeps happening to me - why?).

Obviously my charm offensive was working.

Three drinks and no supper later I teetered out for the long walk home, changing my shoes in the street before striding out and eventually arriving home, cold, damp and starving, half an hour later. The house was in darkness. Youngest daughter had gone to her father, eldest was at work until 11.00pm and my son was slinging bottles of WKD at that well known metropolitan nightspot Vodka Uprising in trendy Acton until 3am. It was to be the first night I spend alone at home in the evening for months. I could hardly wait. I went straight to the kitchen, opened a package of strained-through-the-knickers-of-Cypriot-Virgins Halloumi from Waitrose's How Much Are You Willing to Pay for Cheese Range (brought by the ex who has a bigger shopping budget than I), took some pesto from the freezer (home made, this might not be the classiest sandwich there's no skimping), along with Sainsbury's Basics pitta bread (okay a teeny bit of skimping), sliced some tomatoes and layered it all up together before whacking it into the panini press. I looked at the bottle of vodka for a second, or maybe five - tops - before pouring myself a stiff glass of London Tap with a slice of lime. Then, while the bread was toasting little tram lines into its surface and the cheese was bubbling into salty, melting, deliciousness filling the kitchen with the fragrant scent of basil and pine nuts, I went next door to the sitting room to put to resume watching the BBC 24 coverage of Obama, The Second Coming. As long as I didn’t have to listen to that dire bloody poem again it was going to be Praise Song for a Sandwich and a pleasant night watching ball gowns on Telly.

I switched the light on.

What the…?

I couldn’t quite make sense of what I saw which was loads of white stuff covering the floor and a dust haze hovering across the room like a desert sand storm.

I blinked and looked again, half expecting a jeep with a machine gun on the back, but no.

Instead I found most of the sitting room ceiling strewn in large two inch thick chunks all across the floor, with a one meter wide swathe lying on the sofa exactly where my head and back were still imprinted upon the cushions within easy reach of the remote control and where, had I not gone out to meet my friend for a drink, my oh so brilliant mind would have been crushed to late Victorian lathe and plaster pulp. I think next time the drinks should be on me.  If I can coax him out the back of the chair that is.  I'm not sure how impressed he will be with the whole accidentally saving my life thing.

I called my ex who gave me a list of things to do and people to call to which I replied with my own single instruction: get here. He did and we spent the rest of the evening picking up parts of our house which I always knew was tumbling down around my ears, but not quite so literally.

The rest of it collapsed this morning.

Mingling...

This was my life in all its shallow richness - hundreds of well dressed people crammed into a room where chandeliers drip onto corporate carpeting and waiters with minimal English squeeze through the crowd bearing silver trays of canapés and bottles of champagne in white linen collars.

Okay, well it wasn’t my life every day; but once or thrice a year – the Glendas, Time Out or, as in this case, The Tatler Restaurant Awards. I haven't worked for the FT since 2003 but still my name pops up on out-of-date mailing lists for launches and events, one of which belongs to Conde Nast, god bless the inefficiency of their PR company. This year the Awards Ceremony is being held in the Mandarin Oriental, upstairs in a vast function room with a floor that sways under our feet like an ocean liner sailing through calm waters.  I tell myself it has been sprung for dancing.  I repeat it every time it eddies and dips with attendant stomach lurch because the alternative, that it’s struggling to bear the weight the assembled restaurateurs, is too terrifying.  I see us all tumble to our deaths in a muddle of masonry and shattered glass, and hold my hand out for another (exceptionally good) canape and a Roederer refill to cushion the shock.

I hardly recognize a soul, but then I never did.  Even when these events were the jam on the bread and butter of writing a restaurant column, I could only pick out the household names - the Marcos, the Giorgios, and the Gordons.  I can’t see any of them here but it’s so crowded, it’s impossible to be sure. People stand in mostly male clusters with a token woman who can be the chef’s wife but is more usually the Front of House.  Most of the restaurants I wrote about back then are gone and best forgotten though there are some familiar names in the roll call of those shortlisted for various categories.  The  winner of Best New Restaurant Quo Vadis, in my day was run by Marco Pierre White and the place where a man first told me that ‘it was a pleasure to meet a woman with a brain for a change’.  You know it’s all over when men start admiring you for your mind.  Especially when they are pissed at the time.

Mark Hix, who got something for the Oyster and Chop House, and the tiny Helene Darroze, who I recently interviewed for a magazine article, won Best New Chef.

As well as a nice fee for the piece I still have a night at the Connaught in one of their plush rooms to cash in as a thank you from the Hotel.

Me and my mind are very much looking forward to it.

You're booked

I'm standing in the upstairs room of The George on the Strand surrounded mostly by men who appear to have come straight from the cast of Phoenix Nights. Many of them are printers. All have pints in their hands. None of them look as worried as they might be given that the reason for the gathering is to listen to a debate on ebooks.

I've been deposited near the bar where I have carefully placed my glass of white whilst Tom, our contracts manager, talks about his other life as a writer of, what I have just learned to call, speculative fiction. I thought speculative fiction was the sort of thing that landed on my desk every day, usually accompanied by a misspelt covering letter with 'writer', underlined, beneath the signature, usually executed in green ink, and followed by a word count. In brackets.

I admit, I thought this even after Pedantic Press proudly announced the launch of a new imprint that would be specializing in such material, in addition to other genres such as crime and thrillers (and yes the speculative unsolicited stuff has already started to arrive on my desk addressed to the new editor). However, I have now been enlightened and know that Tom is on the fourth of a series of books, and that he writes fantasy.

Don't we all, darling, don't we all.

My biggest fantasy these days is that I'm writing at all.

But I digress.

I have put my glass down on the bar to stop me unhinging my jaw in my haste to tip the contents down my throat, and am listening to Tom talk about the problems of warfare in alternative universes when a very cheerful woman bowls up to us carrying a clipboard.

She sighs like a woman on a long trek through a difficult terrain who has just encountered an armchair and a foot spa, reaches out and promptly picks up my glass from where it nestles, safely, I had thought (another erroneous assumption) between two leggy, heady, pints of lager.

'Erm, sorry (though I bloody wasn't) but that's my wine,' I say in the tone of voice you would expect from a someone in another sort of difficult terrain, wearing uncomfortable shoes, marooned amongst a clump of men all calling out things like 'Aye there Big Eric, how's tricks!' and robustly slapping one another's shoulders.

That is to say, I yelp. Possibly, I even make that Windolene on glass scream that accompanies any phrase with the words 'alchohol' and 'parted'.

Still she clings on to my wineglass. 'Are you sure?' She asks examining it as though it might have a luggage label with her name attached.

Now, do I look like the sort of woman who doesn't know where her own drink is? There's red lipstick kissing the rim, but nevertheless I glance at Tom for confirmation. He nods and hurriedly picks up his own glass..

'I was certain I put it there.' She insists, still holding it.

'Perhaps the waitress cleared it away?' I suggest, staring anxiously at the glass which she continues to grip, like a child with a boxed doll in a toyshop. 'I know I put it there.'

'Yes, but sorry - that's definitely mine.'

I stretch my hand out out and eventually she has no choice but to hand it over.

'Well I better get your names then. That'll be £5.00 each,' she says, back to business, before bustling off with her clipboard. I didn't put my glass down for the rest of the evening.

I can see why the printers all have white knuckles.

Eventually the debate begins. A chap from Waterstones kicks off with the news that demand for ebooks on their website far outstripped that for conventional books on Christmas Day. I don't think this is much of an indication of a sweeping trend. How many conventional books were sold on their website last year? It's not part of the Christmas ritual, is it? Wake up, open pressies, drink sherry, eat dry turkey, swear never to eat dry turkey again, log on to Waterstone's, buy the latest Michael Connelly, shout at the children, watch Only Fools and Horses... Well, not in my world, anyway. However, it's perfectly natural to assume that having been given a Sony ereader for Crimble, the first thing any self-respecting gadget geek (I believe the technical term is early uptaker) is going to do is, ignore the washing up, get on line and download something immediately so that he can play with his new toy. My kids did the same with their iPods. The youngest had downloaded a movie and several CDs on iTunes before we even got to the breakfast table.

The Waterstone's chap goes on mention the most popular categories for ebooks purchases. These are crime, thrillers and 'what we call Romance but what you,' he looks at the audience, 'probably call literary fiction'. I snort. Yep, publishing literary fiction is indeed a very romantic thing to be doing these days.

A small independent publisher asks one of the experts for more information on publishing for the web and he directs her to a case study of digital publishing on his website called bookkake.com (don't mistype - it's not safe for work). Everybody in the audience pretends to be ignorant of the homophone and its meaning, but there's a lot of embarrassed coughing. I suddenly feel like I'm back at school and the Headmaster is introducing us to our new art teacher Mr Fucks.

Another panellist thought that publishers should be delighted with the advent of the ebook because, unlike a conventional book, it can't be passed around and sold off cheap in a charity shop. There's no extended half-life, he seems to be saying. Mmm.

Unlike, say, the market for knock off DVDs and CDs, the plethoria of illegal music download sites, and the fact that you can watch anything you want, when you want, the minute it appears on American network TV, on a Chinese file-sharing website. It's surely only a matter of time before ebooks catch on, with the counterfeit industry merely a turn of the page behind them. Bootleg ebooks from Asia - the next big thing not coming to a bookstore near you, well maybe not that soon, but definitely a worry.

Gloomy stuff - especially for authors. And they try to pinch your drinks.

End of year accounts

I'm doing my taxes in self-employed solidarity with all the other leave-it-to-the-last-minute financ-o-phobics out there in freelanceville.  The sitting room floor is covered with blank taxi receipts for journeys I don't remember taking and blank deposit stubs for payments I can't remember earning, let alone putting in my bank account.  I make less than almost everyone else I know, and yet still I'm clueless about where some of these cheques have come from.

On the debit side, I'm slightly less confused - painfully so.  There it is - spread in front of me on the threadbare Turkish carpet: my life in till receipts.  The credit note at Jensen (guilt does not come cheap) for the returned gift my husband bought me for my wedding anniversary, presented on the day he decided to leave (if this was fiction, nobody would believe it), sits forlornly on its own.  There are piles of  bills for meals I ate in ignorance, some I choked on, and others I never wanted to eat, the last toyed with on a series of dismal blind dates before being split in half, right down to the last penny of the 10 percent service. There are the credit card slips for evenings of Italian moaning at Julie's Wine Bar; airline tickets bought in happier times when I was blissfully unaware of what lay ahead and what some of these trips concealed, more airline tickets when all was revealed and heels were being kicked (mine, this time), guarantees for electrical appliances which broke down along with everything else last year, receipts for shoes  I haven't worn, and clothes that no longer fit, and bills for haircolours that I've bleached out, and dyed back again.   There are also a lot of point of sale transactions at various branches of Oddbins and Threshers Wine, clumps of expenses for a book I'm probably never going to publish, and wads of paper scraps scribbled with enigmatic phrases, once considered words of genius, but now just words.   It's strange.  I can recall sitting in a hotel room in Guernsey writing some of these sentences down, but can't for the life of me think why I ever thought they were profound.

The worst receipts rear up like scorpions hidden in your shoe:  the post office chit for a parcel sent to France, meant for other eyes.  I torture myself wondering what the package contained though I already know from the joint Amazon account which CDs and Novels were shared with the new love interest.  Take it from me.  When your partner starts reading poetry, you should know you're in trouble.  When the old volumes of Cavafy come down from the high shelves, your redundancy cheque is already in the post.

I don't want to look at the telephone bills with the 033 area code, and I don't want to second guess every minute of my long past life, but nevertheless I do.  I remember where I was when each of the calls were made, and what I was doing when this hidden life was still folded away like one of those kid's fortune telling puzzles, just waiting for the answer to be picked and the future to be revealed.  Who the hell wants to know their future.  The past is more than enough to deal with.

Especially when so little of it is tax deductable and you still have to pay for it all.

Notes on book buying

My elder daughter has been working for a bookseller over Christmas before going off to Montpellier for three months on a language scholarship. Unfortunately, it has not turned out to be quite the literary dawdle she thought it would be. For a start she’s on her feet all day and, like a shipwrecked sailor, surrounded by water that she cannot drink – though drowning in tempting books, she is not allowed to read. Even when the store is deserted, which it invariably is on these slow, cold, January days, she has to look alert and interested in the spacious, but empty, shop floor, waiting longingly for a customer to drift in.

And then, she says, ‘eventually, someone does come in, and with dreary monotony they walk up to the counter and say: “Yeah, like I’m looking for a book?”’ and then wait, expectantly for her response which isn’t (because she needs the money) ‘dude, it’s a freaking book shop, what else would you be looking for?’ but instead is an encouraging ‘yes?’ while they continue to look at her balefully, like a Golden Retriever waiting for a tennis ball to be thrown.

'Yes, a book?' she prompts, virtual ball bouncing down the aisles....

Then almost inevitably they say: ‘It’s something called The Secret? Have you heard of it?’

‘Indeed, yes. Would that be the same The Secret that we have three shelves off in a special display box with THE SECRET printed out above it?’ She cries inwardly, while silently pointing to said display in a prominent position right beside the till and several towering ziggurats of volumes all emblazoned by the words: The Secret. Yep, sorry, it isn't actually that much of a secret any more. It's very, very popular self-help book.

‘But who would buy that? Let alone walk into a bookstore and basically confess, I am a saddo – I need help?’ asks my youngest child - oh she, brimming with empathy and milk of human kindness (luckily she wasn't the one who served the callow youth who came in last week and unflinchingly bought a book on Oral Sex).

‘Erm, I have a copy. Eva gave it to me.’ I confess in a very small small voice.

‘Well it’s not doing you much good, then is it?’ she counters. Coincidentally given all this talk of literacy, I’ve just been to see The Reader, and whilst I'm not exactly breaking into Kate Winslet-like acceptance speech sobs, neither am I doing bounding about doing backfilps and Mick Jagger handclaps.

‘I haven’t actually opened it yet,’ I say in my defence.

She rolls her eyes in her default expression of disgust. A saddo who doesn’t even read the saddo self-help book – obviously beyond the pale.

‘But wait, that’s not the worst of it.' Elder daughter tugs the conversation back - this is supposed to be about her, not me. 'Then you get the others who walk up to the counter and say again: “Yeah I’m wondering if you have a book?” (she mimes gesturing around her to the shelves, laden with such items) and then they go, "I don’t know what it’s called, and I don’t know who it’s by, but it’s about this big (makes book sized shape with hands) and I think it’s green. Or maybe purple. It's something about the countryside?” For God’s sake, how am I supposed to look that up on the computer?' She wails.

‘The other day there was this woman who came in and asked for The Hairdresser of Baghdad and got really upset when I couldn't find it in the catalogue - she called the shop manager and everything - yelling about how "disgusting" it was that we didn't stock it. She said it was a Radio 4 book of the week but only after she’d shouted at everyone, did it occur to me that that what she wanted was The Kabul Beauty School.’

However, the worst most-requested book whose title shall remained yet another secret, is for men who want to get laid in which the author offers pervy advice on how to pick up women. Apparently the other sales assistants have a vendetta going against customers who buy this and issue an alert whenever someone walks into the store and picks it up. Recently a call went round the shop that an eagle had landed in the self-help section. Embarrassingly, the customer turned out to be a young man who had asked my daughter out on a previous visit to the bookstore.

‘Your rejection has sent him over to the dark side.’ Her colleagues berated her. So now she’s been flicking through it herself, just to be forewarned of the pick-up techniques. 'Watch out if anyone tries to stroke your wrist with the line: "You must be a fire sign, your body's responding to my heat."' she says. 'He's obviously read the book.'

'What to mum?' scoffs the youngest, 'That's hardly likely.Who's going to try and pick her up?'

The girl has a point. My last enthusiastic admirer was encountered in Salvador.

And he was 74 and a bit unsteady on his pins.

And gay.

The Pinter Pause

'I loved it.'

'Great choice.'

'My son grabbed it the minute we arrived and then my daughter read it. She was distraught when she realised it wasn't true.'

'I couldn't put it down.'

I can't believe it. For the first time in years the book club has reached a happy consensus. Everybody liked Fieldwork. My choice. This too is a first. As those of you who remember the last book club meeting where Siri Hustvedt went down like birth control at a Catholic sleep-over, my suggestions are not always so enthusiastically received.

'I don't understand why I haven't heard about it before - it's such a good book,' says Marianne, settling herself at the dinner table behind her salad of barley and pomegranate seeds (nicer than it sounds). Precisely my point. I know we at Pedantic shouldn't complain with White Tiger winning the Booker and The Cellist of Sarajevo being Richard and Judified, but I'm still astonished that Fieldwork slipped under most people's radar last year.

'I think it's the first book we've all liked,' says Jamie, our host, plonking down vat of couscous with moghrabia and oven-dried tomatoes.

'What about Kevin?' says Eva, peeling the clingfilm off a bowl of sweet potatoes with pecans (everybody, apparently, got Ottolenghi for Christmas).

'Did we all like that?' I wonder, taking the foil off Tesco's hummus with coriander which I've decanted onto a plate (everyone, that is, except me - my favourite present was a bottle of Kettel One vodka and I'm not sharing that with anyone).

'I hated it,' says Nel. Her offering is pineapple, red pepper, almonds, nigella seeds and spring onion. She's clearing out her fridge.

We begin a long, heated discussion about what variously alerted us to the fact that despite broaching the last taboo of mothers who don't love their offspring, Lionel Shriver didn't have children.

'Or even want them!' adds one of our number, somewhat vociferously for a woman whose two kids are away at boarding school.

'Speaking of which, mine is dropping out of university and coming home to live,' wails another.

A groan of collective sympathy runs round the table, as we momentarily pause, forks on lips, to offer advice.

'Have you tried to disuade her?'

'I sent her a five page email..'

'Charge her rent,' I suggest (whose own drop-out son's sole contribution to the household in 6 months has been to lend me a fiver to pay the cleaner a month or so ago).

'Chapter five...' the poor beleaguered mother replies.

'Make her get a job,' says another.

'Page four...' she responds.

'But you do like her, I mean, you do get on, don't you?' asks Jamie.

'I love her, but I just can't come home to her sitting on the sofa every day when I've been up since six.'

Another collective and hearfelt groan is uttered through mouthfuls of healthy vegetarian food. Yep, we all love our kids but we don't actually want them hanging around past their boss-by date and faced with the more pressing problem of nest-returning fledglings who have long ago grown into full-sized birds with their own television preferences and laundry, Fieldwork is never mentioned again.

However, the important thing is - they liked it. It's a good book. Buy it. Read it.

'By the way, does anyone here really like Pinter?' asks Nel, a screenwriter and film director with a big fat shiny Bafta on her mantlepiece.

There's a small chorus of 'God nos' and one or two uncomfortable silences, most notably from the one of our number who works in the theatre. I remind you that Nel is the person who took me to see Mexican wrestling before Christmas when everyone else was camped out at the Barbican.

'My niece is doing A level drama and frightfully keen on the theatre and she wanted me to take her to see some Beckett. Well, thank God Godot isn't on until April...'

'And so, presumably, you're waiting for him...' I say quickly (well, come on, she fed me the line).

There's a withering glance and more groaning, if anything even more disgusted than that which heralded the question about Pinter.

'...well, anyway, so at least I was spared that, but it meant I had to take her to see Pinter's No Man's Land and there were people in the audience with the script on their knees! And all there ruddy pauses. My niece had an ice cream and when she was scraping the last bits out of the bottom of the tub the man in front of us, who was one of those with the bloody script on his knee, turned round and shushed her. Can anyone explain to me why he's so revered?'

We all look at Jamie whose theatre put on The Birthday Party last year. She coughs and then hesitatingly gives us a fifteen minute lecture on the genius that is Pinter with a lot of mentions of 'debt to', that was something like the spider who swallowed the fly, but with playwrites.

We have our own short pause while we absorb our new literary knowledge.

'He didn't get on with his son,' adds Jamie.

Much meaningful nodding, though I still don't know what it was supposed to infer.

Another pause.

'I sat next to Antonia Fraser at the Hairdresser's the other day,' says Penny. 'She's very beautiful.'

'But, she has terrible hair,' offers Nel, definitively. 'We used to share the same hairdresser and he said she had simply terrible hair.'

'Your hair is looking nice,' says Jamie to Francesca.

We all nod.

Yup. Who the hell needs Pinter?

One man's meat...

It is the custom at Pedantic to bring back treats whenever one of us ventures overseas.  I brought back aniseed biscotti from Brazil, formerly enjoyed with a cup of coffee taken on the terrace beside the pool (though they didn't taste quite so delicious with a mug of decaf taken in front of my computer).  Irina brought back Ghirardelli chocolate from California where she was visiting her sister, Fran came back from her sabbatical in the New York office with  Reese's Peanut Butter Pieces and Oreos, and Ms Rights brought in a box of Jelly Beans from her sojourn in Miami.

The Jelly Beans looked particularly pretty, separated into their individual compartments like beads in one of those stores I had to trail round when my daughters were obsessed with making necklaces (instead of simply stealing mine), their flavours helpfully mapped out on the inside of the lid.

'I warn you, the buttered popcorn is pretty heinous,' she added, helpfully as she placed them in the usual place.

There was an immediate rush for the buttered popcorn which was universally pronounced as 'not that bad'.

I had a lemon and lime which was pleasantly citric, somewhat like toilet cleaner with sugar, and then a juicy pear which was so vile I immediately spat it out.

'My lord, that's like something from Shrek - it tastes like pond slime mixed with a bluebottle.'

'Try the toasted marshmallow, that's absolutely disgusting,' said Mathilda.

We agreed to swap flavours and like two duellers we lined up opposite each other, did a countdown and popped our respective jelly beans into our mouths.

I didn't think the toasted marshmallow was too awful.  'Are you mad.  It's like eating fabric conditioner.  But there's nothing wrong with the juicy pear.  It does taste like pears.'  Mathilda pronounced.

Yep, rancid pears with strychnine jelly.

There's obviously something seriously wrong with her tastebuds, and I remind myself never to go to her house for dinner.

I would have told her but she had fallen back on her chair and was having what looked like an epileptic fit whilst clutching her throat and yelling 'yuck, strawberry daiquiri!'

Another of the office Indians recoiled over the chocolate pudding, while Lyns in accounts thought they are all 'lovely', especially the cinnamon.

Unwisely, I tried the watermelon and thought I had been poisoned.

MD announced that they were delicious as he walked past with a handful even though I warned him that it was like playing Russian roulette with Jelly Beans.

There's just no accounting for taste.  Or lack of it.

However, now that we have shown ourselves to have the palate of a hungover Alsatian, the everyone feels free to unleash upon the office all their unwanted Christmas larder gifts.  It can only be a matter of time before the fruit cakes start to arrive.

And sure enough in Mr T's out-tray this morning I found a box of day-glo RNLI jelly lifeboats with a big sign stuck on the front, saying 'Please Share'.

'I would never have dared to bring them in until  I saw these,' he said grimacing, picking our a Root Beer (engine oil with vinegar - this froom a man who announced that the cake I made for a leaving do looking like sick), and this morning when I came into the office all  the little compartments in the Jelly Bean box were empty. As was the Tin of Hershey Kisses from Ubereditor's trip to New York and all the jelly lifeboats.

Actually, I liked those.  Particularly the orange ones.

Mixed Fortunes

I'm sitting opposite the priest, a tall, handsome African man with a polished brown face and blindingly white teeth, which smile at me reassuringly for all of two seconds before his brow wrinkles in consternation.  He is staring at the cowrie shells which he has thrown into the middle of two rings made of stones and ropes on the table between us.  His long elegant finger sifts through the shells and he sucks his teeth, then looks at me ruefully.  I hear confusa, muito confusa...as he shakes his head.

I don't really need a Candomble priest to tell me that my life is muito confusing, but I do wonder how he could tell this from a heap of shells. Superficially I don't look any different from the others who have filed in here before me:  all three women have wind-tangled hair and worn crumpled shirts in various stages of disarray over swimsuits.  None of us have any obvious jewelery, not even the one who can afford it and who usually wears enough bling to star in her own rap video.  And the men, similarly, have been low key, in linen shirts and swimming shorts.  So what can he tell from our outward appearance? 

'He says your life is very confusing,' reports Antonio, our host's Portuguese Estate Manager who is here in Bahia with her, and is acting as translator.

Yep, got it.  Tell me something I don't know.

The priest drops his white scull capped head over the shells as he stares at them again, his finger carefully picks his way through them like a stork.  He seems puzzled.  He looks up at me and says something that I can't understand, his slurred Brazilian pronounciation ebbing and flowing like the sea.

'He asks if you are planning a trip outside Brazil after this one.' says Antonio.

My mind leaps upstairs to the laptop I closed only a few minutes earlier and the email I just read from an old flame in another far off country suggesting that we meet in March, to which I had enthusiastically agreed.

'Yes....' I say, reluctantly.

'Sim,' Antonio nods, waiting for me to elaborate.  I don't.  How to begin to unravel the multiple complications this trip will create?

More Portuguese, more teeth sucking, more head shaking:  estresse...  pessimista...  It doesn't look good.

'He says he has a feeling that you are going to make this trip anyway, but though he doesn't want to be pessimistic, he urges you to reconsider as this trip is going to cause you a lot of stress - a lot of unnecessary stress, and it might be better if you didn't go.'

A whole series of unfortunate and potentially embarrassing events unfolds in my head, one falling over the other like a line of messy, emotional dominos as I know only too well what can go wrong and how truly estresse things could become.  Do I really want to take that risk? Abso-bloody-lutely not.  I've already cancelled it the email saying I've changed my mind, poised in my mental out-box, ready to be sent.  Not really because of the priest but because the power of suggestion doesn't have to be strong to alert me to the fact that it's A VERY BAD IDEA.  But what a shame.  I was already looking forward to a weekend away in an exotic location with an equally exotic man and a lockable door.

His prophecy came back to me the next day as I huddled in a tiny boat tossed like a cork in a three foot swell of white capped waves off the coast of Salvador, that rocked us all from side to side like the Banana Boats I refused, in fear, to ride at the fairground when I was a child.  Suddenly it occured to me that perhaps I had been a little premature in cancelling my foreign tryst on the priest's say-so.  Perhaps this was the trip I should have avoided?  It was certainly causing me more *ing stress than I'd felt in a long time.

It had all started off so beautifully.  Six of us turned up at the marina - the women abundantly dressed in white (so much so that if I had worn a coloured turban I could have sat on the street and sold Acaraje) with our swimsuits on underneath, all hatted up with our designer glasses and our Factor 50 sunscreen, the men in pastels and Panama hats,  ready to sail around the bay and visit the islands in Paolo's brand new speedboat.

It was wonderfully elegant - all Tippex white calfskin seats, complete with little tables with compartments for your wine glasses, the instrument panel boasting more dials and levers than a space ship, a little bathroom in the cabin, and a wide, cushion laden berth like something out of a film star's boudoir.   We boarded, some of us more elegantly than others.  The Fosbury Flop came in particularly useful for me in a way it never did for the high jump on sport's day.

The engines roared into life and PHWOAR we were off, along the coast, hats hurriedly kicked to the floor and hair horizontal in the breeze, winding our way up mangrove lined rivers, palm trees and banana trees and, well, tree trees as far as the eye could see.   We sailed up to an abandoned convent where we put down anchor, opened a couple of bottles of champagne and took turns at posing for photographs.

'Who would have thought that we'd be sitting here like this when we met 30 years ago in Oxford?' said Audrey, raising her champagne glass and chinking mine.

Indeed, who would have thought it.  Back then, we both had bicycles and damp houses without central heating.  Now she has a summer house in Salvador and, okay, I still have a bicycle and a damp house - but now it does have central heating.

We sailed on and on and then stopped for a lunch of grilled crevettes and shrimp curry, before meandering around the biggest island heading back to Salvador, just as the wind picked up and the sea, previously a placid lake of torpid leaden water, grew first needles, and then boiled like hot chip fat with white crested peaks.  Salvador's skyscrapers were tiny lego blocks on the horizon as we bounced over the swell, slapping the water again and again until I began to wish I hadn't had the second glass of wine, or a second helping of curry.  And then a shriek of alarm pierced the sky, a red light flashed, and the boat suddered to a halt.

One of the engines had failed.

'It's probably just a plastic bag or something,' said Paolo, but he wasn't going to get his Armani shorts wet by diving down to have a look.  'We'll just go the rest of the way on one engine,' he shrugged, but with only half the power driving us forward, now the waves slapped us, and occasionally cuffed us round the ear as the spray engulfed the boat.

Gerry's cafe au lait linen shirt rapidly developed a bib of moisture down the front and his sunglasses needed windscreen wipers to clear the water streaming down his face.

He was not amused.   

Ten minutes later, the alarm sounded again and the boat stopped.

Right in the middle of the ocean, land a speck  behind us, Salvador a row of pebbles ahead of us. 

 A ferry trudged past and we flipped almost horizontal in its wake

Is this a good time to remember that I'm mortally afraid of deep water?

Paolo immediately got out his cell phone and made a call.  To the coastguard, we assumed.

Erm, no.  There is no coastguard.

Well then to the search and rescue?

Nope.

The lifeboat service?

Strike three.

He was calling his friends to see if any of them were around in their boats and would come and collect us.

'It's okay,' he said, eventually, 'Someone is on their way.'

He lifted his iphone to his ear again and gradually it occurred to us he was giving directions to the other boat.

Directions in the middle of the fricking ocean?  What was he using as a landmark?  There was no land.  I heard him say ferry - luckily the word is the same in Portuguese as it is in English. So great, we're stranded in the path of the ferry which has just ploughed past us and isn't due back for another hour.

'Well at least we know we're fifty feet from the bottom of the sea,' quips Jerry looking at the sonar which helpfully also shows shoals of fish swimming towards us.

'Doesn't he have GPS,' says Mr Audrey, irraciably.

'Yes,' says Antonio, 'But he doesn't know how to use it.'

I looked at the sun, hanging at five fifteen.  It gets dark at six fifteen.

'Hey but can't we tell our coordinates from our cells,' Jayne suggests.

Four iphones appear, but though everyone knows how to send a text, take a photograph, play movies and download podcasts, nobody knows how to find our position.

Tomorrow's AOL headlines are reeling out in my head in the space cleared by the emotional dominos:  Pleasure Cruise ends in Tragedy: One Briton amongst the drowned.  I'm the one on the left holding the ruddy champagne glass unaware I'm going to be dead an hour later.

The boat rocks like a cradle on crack.

Pete disappears into the cabin and begins, in Glasgow speak, 'Shouting for Huey.'  His many years in the Dutch Merchant Navy have not equipped him for this.  Because then he was in a ship that sailed.

We all block our ears so we don't join the chorus.  And now this means the bathroom is out of bounds, along with the cabin when, thirty minutes later, he passes out on the bed, and we are still sitting there being tossed about by ever higher waves, as the sun drops to five forty-five and I'm so close to panic I can smell its shaving soap.

How the hell is his friend's boat going to find us in the dark?

In the distance someone sees the spray of on oncoming boat.  We cheer and watch it come imperceptibly closer. Gerry begins a chorus of 'Rescue Me'.   And then it sails right past us.

'What's the morse code for SOS?' asks Gerry.  Someone supplies it (we've still got internet) and he sounds it out on the horn.  The boat turns around and comes back for us.  Relief all round.  'It's the person who sold you your house,' Paolo tells Mr Audrey.

This is Brazil folks, where your architect takes you out on a jolly and has to be rescued by another client who used to live in the property you now own.  How to make friends and influence people.  Lesson 1.

Five minutes later another, larger boat arrives and rope is thrown over the side so that it can tow us back into the harbour.  It takes an hour, one broken rope and a small rubber dingy with an outboard motor to get us there.  It is also pitch black by the time we arrive and every five minutes of the trip has brought another wave flooding over the side of the boat like a bucket of water in a carry on film, drenching each and every one of us.  Audrey is sitting wrapped in a sodden towel.  Gerry and Antonio have been huddling behind the instrument panel, and I have wet white clothing plastered to my body from head to toe through which my green and blue swimsuit can be seen as clearly as though I were wearing cellophane.

For the next 24 hours I can hardly stand up due to motion sickness, my hair is set in a salt stiffened beehive, I am sunburnt, sandblasted and I have a scrape on my cheek from God knows where and for this, for this I cancelled a weekend of carnal bliss with the only man I've been interested in for months imagining that it was going to cause me stress?

*

double *

After he had warned me about the trip, the priest had held my hand over a glass of water, then clutched the pebbles that I had been holding since he began his reading.

He looked sorrowful.

I heard:  coração...quebrados... fraturado.

Antonio translated awkwardly, but he didn't need to.  I already knew that too.

Happy New Year

It's all very well sitting in a tropical paradise in another hemisphere with a caipirinha in one hand and a piece of shaved churrasco in the other, but time passes slowly when you are waiting for it to be midnight.  

In the past days we've been up country to my friend's facienda, driven down through rivers and salt flats and along miles and miles of beaches through miles and miles of palm trees with a gaucho riding ahead of us to open the gates.  

We've drunk coconut milk brought to us by a small boy who climbed up a spindly palm with a machete in one hand and then hung upside down by his feet to show off afterwards.  We've been into Salvador, guided by the supersuave Gilvan who was a previous Lambada champion (and who will wiggle his shoulders at any excuse) where I managed to trip over some scaffolding and lose both my dignity and most of the skin off my right leg.  

We've had a capoiera troup come to the house and perform for us (without underpants I couldn't help but notice), had a meal cooked for us by Salvador's most famous cook, the ebullient Dada, who brought enough food to feed a battalion and then later sang for us.  

Gerry and I have performed a Beatles' medley (those caipirinhas are strong), we've romped in the waves, floated in the pool, eaten every conceivable sort of tropical fruit, been exorcised by the anointment of herbs and, bizarrely, popcorn.

And now it's only ten thirty on New Year's Eve and we're all yawning our heads off.

I suggest a game.  Each of us writes a series of names down on scraps of paper and we take turns each at guessing them.

'But how will we know who they are?  We don't know the same people,'  says Socrates.

'That's the point, it's more fun if we don't because you have to try and act it out like charades.'

(I know, I know - I'm alone in the universe where people love charades, but sod off - I'm happy.)

Everybody is sufficiently bored to scribble furiously.  The men go first.

The first clue is pulled out and Socrates points at Mr Audrey.

'Mr Audrey,' shouts his team of merry men, triumphantly.

Then he points at Audrey.

'Audrey' shouts his team. 

'No pointing!' I yell sternly.

'Audrey's daughter,' says Socrates.

Another point.

It quickly becomes evident that many of those present have simply written down Audrey's family members.  We get her son, her other son, her mother, her nephew, all her friends (except those of us present) and Mr Audrey's mother.

The game isn't going well.  Don't these fricking captains of industry, financial giants of American commerce and corporate movers and shakers have any ruddy imagination?  They can make a million before breakfast but they can't come up with even Donald Trump?

Because of the women, the level is raised somewhat.  Suddenly we're on to Gertrude Stein, David Beckham, Karl Marx, Barbara Streisand, Glennys Johns, Steven Sondheim (okay, some of the men are gay but we single women try to keep that hidden, pretending that we've picked up a couple of gigolos on the beach), and then cheating begins.  The financial giant appears to have the handwriting of a chimp and the other men keep trying to slip his names back into the basket because they can't read it.  Nobody knows who Ronaldo is (as I said, they are gay) even when the clue was the clown in the McDonald's ad, and so his name is also surreptitiously slipped back into the mix.  Those men hate to lose and quibble about every point, but still we women are winning 65 to 12 when, mercifully, just in time to save their pride, it's time.

We load up with white flowers and all dressed in white we stroll down to the beach to mingle with the other hundred or so other white clad people assembled there and wait for the fireworks to go off along the coast as the signal to walk into the sea, jump over the waves and give our offerings to Yemanja, goddess of the sea.  

Yemanja doesn't seem to think much of them and rapidly spits them right back out again.

But we're still hoping that all our wishes come true.

We go back to the house we gather at the pool eat manioc cheese balls, open some champagne and have the first of many toasts, and the game is never mentioned again.

In Scotland, three hours earlier, there's a man somewhere, pissed, huddled outside in the snow holding a bottle of whisky, a black bun and a piece of coal waiting for the bells so that he can knock on the door and be the 'first foot'.  In Brazil, we decide to have a dip in the pool.  It's warmer than most of the baths I had until I was at least 25.

Stupid, stupid, northerners.