Poetry in predictive text

...and then Sarah at work gave me this book.

She said: Oh Marion, this looks like one for you, and left the volume on my desk, as slim as hope, with its buff paper cover peppered with little hearts for all the world like a schoolgirl's textbook. And the title?

The Love Letters of Famous Men

Inside, in case you're a bit dense and haven't managed to keep up, these are short excerpts from the love letters of Pliny the Younger and Henry VIII (to Anne Boleyn who must have sort of wished she had just slept with the ugly old devil instead of hanging out for the white dress, though hanging may not be quite the best verb, chop-chop) - all full of longing and devotion.

And if I scroll back through my mobile phone, what do I have? Yep - a text message that says: I like your *.

Ah, the silver tongued modern man.

You can't live without them, and you can't shoot them in the head.

That Friday feeling

Friday. It used to be the high spot of my week and now I greet it with the dread of a debt collector. I come back to the house with my heart in my heels. There is three days worth of junk mail lying on the doormat, shoes laid out like dance steps on the tiles of the hall, hoodies and jumpers hanging with one arm hooked around the stair-rail and the smell of burnt toast hanging bitterly in the air.

In the kitchen carbon films the counter tops as though we’ve been dusted for fingerprints, and indeed there has been a crime. The crime is filth. Dishes seem to be gathering for some sort of grime convention. It’s making me feel like I’m 19 again, but not in a good way. It reminds me wearily of kitchens gone by - you probably remember the sort of place I mean - melamine counters peeling at the edges, spotted grainy, stainless steel sinks with other people's pots containing the memories of other people's meals, all piled on top of each other like the leaning tower of pizza, food scattered like confetti all over the stove, clogging up the drain, and crumbs crunching underfoot.

There's a lid that once closed an ice cream container and when I pick it up melted ice cream curdles and slides off the plastic all over my feet and on to the floor.

It suddenly strikes me that I’m in flat share hell with my own kids, but instead of it being some faceless landlord that owns the furniture and pays for the home maintenance, it’s me (with magnanimous help from the ex).

So it’s my lovely black lacquer dining table that I bought fondly imagining it surrounded by friends (that I don’t seem to have) set with all my beautiful candle sticks and Designer Guild plates (the former have been burnt down during last weeks house party and are covered in wax, and the latter are wearing their name tags for the convention in the sink) and instead find it covered in CDs a computer, two screens, laundry, papers and three glasses.

There is unfolded laundry all over the kitchen table, pots crusty and cold on the oven, dirty laundry in two bags vomiting clothes all over the upstairs hall, the bathroom should be condemned and there is a trail of cocoa puffs all over the floor just so the mice can find them before the ants do.

This is why people used to send their kids down the mines. Just to get them out of the bloody house.

But at least you’re not alone, friends say. And yes, it’s true, I’m not alone, except in any way that’s enjoyable.

I am tripping over people, I find them sleeping on my floor, lying in my bathtub, wearing my bras, pointedly not eating my food, borrowing my concealer (I’m fifty for goodness sake – who do you think needs more concealer – me or a sixteen year old with peaches instead of skin?)

On the way back from the daily walk round Wormwood Scrubs, Nel and I ran into her neighbour.

'Oh hi,' she greeted me enthusiastically. 'I am so glad I saw you, I just wanted to tell you that I’m off on holiday with two books written by people who live around here.'

'Oh yeah', I try to sound enthusiastic, but it would be a stretch under normal circumstances, in today’s climate I don’t really want to even admit that there exist other writers.

'That Sadie woman who is on Richard and Judy and was shortlisted for the Orange, she lives down there' (she points) 'and the whatsername something about Moths, lives down there – she was handing out copies of the book when she was picking up her kid from school. She said to me, is this naff?'

(Yep, it’s naff)

'…and I said, no, I bake cakes and hand them out, you write books and hand them out.'

(okay it’s not that naff, because a cake takes like thirty minutes and a book takes that many months, so it’s just faintly desperate – I like her already.)

'…so next year I’ll take your book on holiday.'

Hahaha, I laugh weakly. As though I want to know that there are two other really fantastic writers who live within two streets of me. Does that help. Have their husbands also left them? Are they also living with the mistletoe of with adult kids who still think they are five?

I already know the poet who used to live up the road until he left his wife, and that Margaret Drabble has a house a few streets across, and I know that Will Self used to live round the corner in my friend Rosie's house. I know. I know. I’m a citizen of literary, shagging, dinner party London. But I don’t have a work permit.

I’m in the kitchen doing their bloody washing up.

The haves and the have nots

At work and the phone rings with a friend doing her Katherine Hepburn impersonation, except that this is actually what she sounds like, but breathy and appealing and sort of adorable - if it isn’t kind of wrong for a 47 year old woman to be cute.

Which it isn’t. She's lovely, so shut up.

Marion, she drawls, I wanted to call you after lunch last week because I needed to tell you that about one day a month my husband is totally in love with me and the rest of the time he hardly notices I’m there and you just happened to catch him on a loved up day.

I know what she means. When she took me out last week he was being effusively affectionate in the way that even under normal happily married circumstance makes me want to garrotte myself with a dinner napkin, but these days just impels me to walk in front of a bus. It’s not that you don’t want your friends to be happy, but you wish they would be a little less conspicuous about it and though I really can only celebrate the fact that she and her husband are mutually besotted, it makes me envious.

Yep, envious.

I used to be the one with the doting, if distracted, husband, and now I’m the cast off, no-body loves me, I think I'll go and eat worms.

Oh it’s fine, I said, but I must admit it did make me realise what I was missing, I admitted. Believe me, winsome didn't come in to it.

No, but we have just as unhappy a marriage as anyone I know, she insisted, being a dear and rubbishing her perfectly functioning, relationship just so that I didn’t feel slighted. She goes on:

I know that before I sold my book a friend of mine got hers published and though I was happy for her, it made me less happy with myself.

Yes, precisely. Other people’s success is a dish best served when you are totally satiated by your own cooking.

Anyway, we had a big argument last night and we’re not speaking, she said. I just wanted you to know that.

Quite. I’m the first port of call for the SS Schadenfreud.

I’m not that shallow, I wanted to tell her, but I didn’t, because maybe I am.

She had hardly hung up when another of our authors came into the office – she of the Clever Girls Book Club who has just written the book of her career according to Mr T. And yes, I'm impressed and glad for her and muttering under my breath: success is a dish best served when you’re totally satiated by your own cooking, so I start bulking up on my own modest literary achievements to stop myself feeling peckish when I see her plate piled high with plaudits.

I’m reciting to myself; Look Marion you got American rights (yeah - yeah, I know it was at a mere fraction of what she sold hers for but don't go there - step away from the six figure sum and concentrate), Dutch rights, Italian rights, Portuguese rights, a lovely letter from the Italians telling me how honoured they were to be publishing my 'beautiful book'. Did you see that Marion? ‘Beautiful’. Hah! And then there was the lovely, lovely specially shot cover... how lovely is that?

I’ve run out and have to start chewing back at the beginning again as she tells me how her American publishers don’t seem to be planning much of a publicity tour.

Publicity tour?

Yikes, I hadn’t even thought to be upset that I wasn’t having one, but now I have another thing to feel inadequate about. My 'beautiful book, my 'beautiful' book,’ I recite to myself.

I tell her my husband has just left me.

She reminds me that her ex-fiance, coincidentally a fellow countryman (almost) of my ex-husband, and she broke up a year ago.

'*ing *s,' she fumes.

'Yeah, *ing *s.' I agree.

'Prozac,' she announces, definitively. 'It's a great help.'

'I’m self medication with alcohol, bad dates and chocolate,' I reply.

'Well, whatever gets you through it,' she says.

And suddenly we're sisters, forget the publishing rivalry.  We're in the same band.  Founding members of the Bad Bloody Relationship Tribute Band.  Both wearing the T shirt.

Money laundering and other office skills

From the truly sublime to the ridiculous.

On Monday I was up at five in the morning and instead of riding the bus to work, I was on my way to Belgium to interview the owner of a real live chocolate factory. Not, I hasted to add, that the chocolate factory was in Belgium - no, in fact it's in Shepherd's Bush, about five minutes from my house. But the owner got his inspiration for the business he started while he was working in Belgium. So, off we went to follow him on his sentimental journey by Eurostar rather than the tube to White City, a little retinue, a harem of women - a PR, a photographer, a photographer's assistant, me and his Marketing Manager, all trailing him, as we went from chocolate shop to patisserie to cafe, collecting samples of chocolate and cakes as we went. It was like being with the Pied Piper of Hamlyn after the people defaulted on their payment, but instead of leading away the children, he was doing a bit of a mopping up operation on the chocolate.

There he was in a crumpled linen shirt, jeans and Italian shoes, wandering through the centre of Brussels - a confection itself with its gilded buildings and gothic decoration, like icing on a particularly elaborate wedding cake - while the photographer followed him, snapping away, and the rest of us walked behind, carrying the chocolates, like ladies in waiting and Prince Philip in drag.

To be honest, we hadn't even got the first cafe with Chocolate Man when I had already tired of the notion of ever having to eat chocolate again. I was dreaming of bacon, and strong coffee, neither of which I could have. But I did have moules frites and waffles, and was home, laden with patisserie, by seven in the evening.

But stop the week was an afternoon listening to tales of shagging pigs, shagging sheep and shagging bulls with Mr Ginger Pig and learning such gems of Farming Lore as 'nothing with nuts on makes good meat' and 'you don't want to put anything with nuts on into your mouth'. I totally agree. 'It makes them tough', apparently. There you go. That's why men are never very tender. But before this, I had dinner with the literary friend where the main conversation topic was not, as you might have expected, this being literary London, darling, the Booker longlist on which one of our authors is prominently featured, but topics of a different sort for which the younger (much younger) women at the table definitely had a scoring system.

I just ate my chicken and learned a lot that, sadly, has come too late in life to be much use to me.

Dinner wasn't ready until about nine (coincidentally the... no, I'm not going there) and so by the time we ate I had drunk rather a lot and this morning was still suffering a little.

I finally arrived at work at 8.15 almost crying with the desire for an Alka Seltzer, switched on my computer, and found a list of executive tasks left for me by Mr T who was off on a mammoth tour of South West England Rail visiting various authors.

Executive task no 1: book another train ticket for next week going to Crewe.

So far, so fairly easy. I'm getting good at Internet Fraud with the company credit card and can type his name and mastercard number faster than my own these days.

Executive task no 2. Log on to William Hill and put 100 pounds on our author Aravind's White Tiger to win the Booker.

Mr T had been, the previous morning at a Courvoisier reception (it's a tough life being at the top) and had a couple of miniatures sitting on his desk, one of which, he gave over to me after I'd stared at it wistfully, and which I still had in my handbag as though I was going to sprint into action as some sort of Bloomsbury St Bernard, ready to offer mountain rescue and sustenance to those in need outside Faber & Faber when they find the Queen's Larder hasn't yet opened.

So this is how I came to be sitting, hung over, doing on-line gambling at 9.30 on a Friday morning with a miniature of brandy in my handbag.

It's all very Raymond Chandler.

All I needed was a cigar and a gun in my pocket.

A nine incher naturally.

The book writing club

This morning the phone rang at work. It was a friend who, coincidentally (yes I know publishing seems to be all about who you know, but knowing me will not get you far) is the author of book we are publishing next year, on a deadline, sitting in a café, whacking out the last few thousand words of her opus. I had no sooner transferred her to higher powers when there was a second call, this time from yet another member of the Networking Bookclub of Yesteryear whose book we are also publishing next year (are you sensing a trend yet?) wondering when Mr T was free for her to stop by and visit. I found her a window, and relayed the message through the glass ceiling, where Mr T raised his head and said: 'Ah, so you’re having lunch out today.' It was a statement not a question, and I wondered how he knew that yes, indeed I was having lunch that very day with yet another friend who had recently submitted a novel for our consideration.

You would be forgiven for thinking that I only know authors.  In fact I only know these three authors.  The rest of my friends are, apparently, in hiding.

Before I could ask how he had a hotline to my social life,  he announced: 'We’ve just given her a three book deal.'

'Oh,' I said, as I walked out in pursuit of a J5 sized Jiffy Bag to cushion my envy, no no actually it was to put a couple of copies of Aravind Adiga's White Tiger, just longlisted for the Booker and as a result in demand by every publication in town from Large Cat Weekly to Albinos Today. But then I stopped, and went back into the office for a PS.

I must just say that it kind of pisses me off that you’ve published books by almost everyone else I know who can hold a pencil but you turned my book down.

Twice, I didn’t say, but stood there long enough for him, perhaps, to remember the serial occasions it languished on his desk before I came to work here.

He hesitated then offered a thoughtful, measured and very professional response – smiled and lifted both hands and gave me the v sign.

I replied in kind.

Not something you usually do to your boss on which your livelihood and salary (if not your publication) depends.

What are you complaining about? He asked. You’re at Waddling Duck and they’ve got the whole machinery going for them.

I’m just saying, that’s all.

And why shouldn’t I publish them. They’re all talented, driven, ambitious and very bright women. He said.

Not arguing with you, Mein Bookmeister, but, so what am I? Chopped, rarely driven, liver, lacking in ambition woman of a lesser talent?

Truthfully I’d rather have the job than the contract with dear old Pedantic Press, and God knows, I wouldn’t want to be competing with all these brainy women in the Key Title stakes in the same publishing meeting, but the pangs of inferiority are like a twist of lemon in the Grey Goose vodka of rejection which I can't stop knocking back.

And then I have to drag my lumpen self off to have lunch with the three book pink Cosmopolitan girl.

It’s made worse by the fact that she’s little and slim and perky and pretty and connected as well as beautifully dressed in a little silk skirt that flirts around her knees like a Cuban after a passport in a Havana dancehall, while I look like laundry.

I woke up that morning and decided I would wear my new white t-shirt. Then couldn’t find it. So, then I thought, okay I’ll wear the black dress, and the black dress was too tight, and so then I moved back to another t-shirt – a flesh coloured one which needs a flesh coloured bra. Beep. Also missing (we seem to have a somewhat communal attitude to undergarments in my house which I only hope does not extend to the male members of the family), and so I ended up in a skirt that looked like a potato sack and a shirt that dripped rather than draped. The flip flops just added ankles to insult. I was, frankly, surprised when the staff at the Wolsey didn’t stop me at the door and direct me on to the nearest homeless shelter.

But no, they directed me to a table where my lunch date sat with her other important asset. Her husband.

He was having lunch with a couple of high earning, well maintained women in high heels and too-tight clothes on one side of the restaurant and she was having lunch with Help The Aged me on the other. In between was Trevor McDonald and Edwina Curry and Howard Jacobson. Not all together, I may add, but sprinkled like salt on different tables.

She told me all about her books. I whipped out a picture of my cover the way I used to do with my children, with about as much admiration.

'Oh it looks lovely' (not mentioning the cradle cap, infantile excema and baldness) while they then get out the studio shots of their own offspring, taken by David Bailey, in which they’ve all got blonde curls and hand shirred antique christening gowns. Yours is in a baby gro with pudding on the front and drool in strings from their mouth, and naturally still isn’t sitting up at 8 months while theirs is already walking.

Oh groooooooooan.

Books are just as exhausting as babies, believe me.

She chattered prettily and cleverly and animatedly and charmingly while I slumped.

'I’m so sorry,' she said, 'this was supposed to be us being miserable together, but I’m so happy about my books.'

'Oh I’m not miserable,' I said, defensively, making an effort to smile which turned me into a sort of Cheri Blair novelty bottle opener.

It used to be in youth that the danger was drinking and dialing, you know, the itchy finger in the taxi on the way home when you decided you really have to ring the ex-boyfriend and tell him how much you love him, despite the fact that you haven’t seen him in 12 years and the last communication you had from him was a restraining order.

However, now, in the absence of old boyfriends, or indeed new boyfriends, it’s drinking and dishing you have to beware of.

And this is how I start blabbing:

She sympathised.

'No, I’m fine really, absolutely fine,' I added, the voice faltering, the words disappearing into that hole between thought and speech and emerging like bad reception on the World Service from a wind up radio.

Nevertheless I had a lovely lunch, then I plodded like a yeti up Bond Street, stopping to try on clothes in Jigsaw that made me look, if anything, worse than I did in the clothes I was already wearing, but in wrap around mirrors.

Why did I need to do that?

Wasn’t I feeling bad enough without going into the changing room?

Apparently not.

Elfophilia

It’s true then. White men really can’t dance. Not even if they are wearing pixie hats and ZZ Top beards, harlequin trousers and a Peruvian blanket. In fact, all those things seem guaranteed to ensure the wearer possesses no rhythm whatsoever and that even when standing in front of a stage of fantastic African musicians the best they can do is pogo up and down.

I mean, what is it about Ponchos? And ponytails? Are they innately and cosmically linked with music festivals? Is it a camping essential to wear a blanket with a hole cut out for the head? There are bands of them, all striped like woolly toothpaste with wide cowboy hats on their ponytailed heads, but, sorry, they just can’t pull it off the way Brad Pitt did in The Mexican. Especially in the rain. I'm wondering if there is a special shop out there like Blacks and Millets that sells Festival Survival Gear basics like felted hats that look like sperm and trousers made of old curtains. You know - primus stove, North Face Anorak, sock bells, his n' hers lime green elasticised capri pants and caftans... What exactly do those noble and dignified Ghanain musicians make of playing to a load of middle aged men shaking like they've got St Vitus dance in jumble sale outfits dressed as Hobbits?

I need answers.

And I’m not even going to get into why women over fifty wear tutus and fairy wings. The kids and the teenagers I understand, but the matrons? What’s wrong with my festival gear: two pairs of trousers, a waterproof coat, a Barbour, two t-shirts, a hoodie and flip flops?

It’s better for the rain than a woollen blanket, and believe me, I have personal experience of that.

Turns out that music festivals, even hippy peace and love music festivals, really are all about the rain. The lashing rain. The howling wind and the lashing rain. The clammy tent with condensation on the inside of the shell, the clammy sleeping bag with condensation on the inside of the lining, the clammy wellies that you slip your feet into in the middle of the night to stumble through the tent city, fall over guy ropes and eventually arrive at the beacon of light, the portaloos, and then discover you’ve forgotten the clammy toilet paper, howling wind and lashing rain.

There were times, notably listening to a 12 piece gypsy band from Romania who may, or may not, have been playing 12 seemingly different tunes very fast because they were hurrying up to get to another music festival in Cheltenham (though some were in more of a hurry than others) when the rain was coming down in sheets and pooling behind me on the chair, and running down my legs that I wondered how on earth I was going to survive.

And then Tom, camping expert, lit a camp fire and Nel opened the vodka and suddenly, it all seemed worth it.

This is how they endure the Russian winters, and it will certainly do me on a wet summer night in Dorset.

Actually, moaning set aside, just for a minute, on the tea plate of life, it was really really great fun. Not only did I endure but I went native. I didn't wash for three days, slept in all my clothes and by the end had my hair in bunches and wore a gold dress over several layers of clothing and green wellies two sizes too big. Then we fried bacon, ate vegetarian carbohydrates by the bucketful, drank boxes of wine - as perfected by one of our group - a very tall, handsome Brand consultant who had arrived at my house for the trip in a Puffa Jacket carrying a Bill Amberg holdall and a corporate golf umberella, then walked about with his wine box under his arm, just dispensing vino like one of those Syrian tea sellers (and used the rose to put the fire out). He was also wearing a powder pink shirt and overheard one of the gnome-men say to his gnome friend, that's a really gay shirt - this from a man with glitter on his face! We sat round our fire and listened to the cute Australian guitarist at the tent next to us practice as we ate chilli stuffed olives and Pringles, and laughed. And though some of the music was just sub wedding stuff in a different language (singing it in Croation guys doesn't make it world music, it just makes it Eurovison song contest) some of it was truly wonderful.

So I'm no longer a camping virgin. Nor a festival virgin. However, as I predicted, there was absolutely no need to take along any kind of protective outerwear unless it had toggles and a hood. Well unless you have a particular fetish for middle aged men dressed up as woodland elves, in which case you have bigger problems than birth control, trust me. But - it's true you certainly don’t want to add to the world population of such creatures.

And now I'm back. Feeling dirty. 

But not in a good way.

Fading fast

I've been up to my ears in Frankfurt this last week, arranging Mr T's appointments for the book fair. This involves me sending emails to another woman in another foreign capital making dates in a diary for another person who is invariably a man. Most of the women, no matter how grand they are, will respond to an email and make their own appointments, even if they also forward their appointment on to their assistant. Once again it's another foray into the world of women and invisible men - booking travel, booking restaurants, booking hotels...even going to the shrink. All day long I speak to women about men. No wonder they think they run the world.

I'm also fairly invisible myself at work. A couple of the other members of staff were talking about the latest manuscript just in by one of our authors. Are you enjoying it? asked one of the other (and yes the author is a man).

I'm not sure about it yet, I need to read some more.

I asked what it was and one said, Oh Mr T sent it round so a few of us could read it.

I realised that I wasn't one of the few.

This happened before, just a few weeks ago with a comic novel that we later bought and which had everyone laughing enthusiastically. Except me. I just overheard the office conversation.

It's like the 5th Year Common room all over again. To quote The Sopranos: Nursing Homes are just High School with walkers. Publishing companies are High School with books.

I can see literary discourse is not one of my perceived strengths, still, I've had another offer for the Portuguese rights to my book, which the agent has accepted, and last week, a cover arrived.

What do you think about? said the editor.

I love it, I replied.

So far it's a picture of a woman in a pink coat walking off into the distance on a railway platform. Sex in the City meets Brief Encounter.

Mind you, I added. It would have been kind nice if they had got my name right.

It's Marion with an 'o' not Marian with an 'a'.

Even on the front of my own book, I'm not myself.