Welcome to the website of
Rosemary Furber
| Home | News | Biography | Books | Contact | Links |
Latest NewsMonday, 16th January 2012Hold on, what am I saying? What if Kindle takes off and we end up in an all-Kindle world? And if electricity priced itself beyond us all, what then? Those ineffably cool people who’ve got all the second hand books (bought up for almost nothing like derelict sites during a housing slump), they would be multi-millionaires. Even a thumbed and tear-stained Harry Potter could buy you a five-bedroom house in Hampstead and for a complete set of Everyman you’d get the whole of Chelsea FC. Our minds wouldn’t be under-nourished but we’d have missed so much. The peace of book shops where the simple act of resting your eyes on all those spines lowers the heart rate and lifts the spirit. The deft gentleness of their staff and owners. All those one-off chats in bookish coffee shops and on public transport about the book you happen to have in your hand. The excitement of finding comments, your own and other people’s, written years ago in an old book. Opening something you haven’t looked at in years and catching a waft of a long lost lover or long dead relative. Coming across an old bookmark - so often they're photographs, tickets, a boarding pass, each one with its own memories. Finding a weird edition of something you’ve loved for years and comparing it with what you know. The sound-proofing elegance of bookshelves at home, where friends roam free and help themselves. Oh yes, above all that easy generosity of lending and borrowing. In other words, a whole community of readers across time and space who share the satisfaction of being earthed by a real book. Long may it thrive. Add Comment | View Comments Thursday, 12th January 2012 It was Helen of Troy that did it. In the small hours I got fed up wrestling with the miniscule print, put the book down and with a merry one-click, it was mine on Kindle. I haven’t looked back. Reading a Kindle is as sensually satisfying as kissing a lamppost but Bettany Hughes’ descriptions of her Bronze Age princess growing up among saffron and wild silk, honey and olives, brawny heroes and finely beaten gold have seduced me. Kindle can be the home of great things. Imagine me now like the advert, reading it as I cook, bathe, travel, the lot. And I haven’t even changed the basic font size. Will I ever pick up a proper book again? Of course I will. But I doubt if it’ll be a hefty one in tiny print. Add Comment | View Comments Thursday, 12th January 2012 What’s this in my inbox? An invitation from my old friend Richard Foreman to the launch of Endeavour Press. It was only a matter of time before authors took hold of this ebook thing and ran with it and here they are: Richard of Chalke Authors and journalist Matthew Lynn who says ‘Electronic publishing is the best thing to happen to writers since the invention of instant coffee and the biro’. Why’s the ebook so great for writers? I discovered this from the mighty TA Donnelly who came to pick my brains about being a ‘proper author’. He finishes his day’s work, sits down with a gin and writes zombie novels into the night. He does it all himself with lulu and Kindle and they’re selling very nicely indeed. He’s a happy smiling author, and there aren’t many of those around. Why? He can see on a daily basis how many he’s selling and recoups 70% of the cover price. 70%! He also knows instantly whenever a reader highlights something, which in his case happens to be a paragraph full of expletives. What’s missing from this sort of publishing generally is the stringent editing of a good publisher, and I'm a great fan of that. So what we need is good publishers getting in on this, making great books for readers and giving us writers a fair share of that 70%. Bring it on. Add Comment | View Comments Friday, 6th January 2012 Curiosity’s got the better of me and I’ve plugged it in. (A little button on its bottom.) A digital letter comes up – ‘Dear Rosemary’, it says, ‘Kindle is a revolutionary reading device and we’re excited that you have joined the millions of people around the world who read on Kindle.’ Why did it take me so long? Credit where it’s due (to amazon and Kindle), it did not take me long to work out – mostly on my laptop, not the Kindle itself – how to download, search and so on. And I’m hooked. Addiction, thy name is one-click. In no time I have downloaded the complete works of Austen, Dickens, Wilde, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy (annotated), all with change of a tenner. I probably won’t read them on Kindle either but I’m thrilled. I must download some living writers, they need the money, so I’m off to the bestselling lists. Within seconds I’ve almost lost the will to live. It’s a surreal world in there. So many diets, so little time. Escape the Diet Trap? I can do that by turning this off! A monthly subscription to the Guardian / Observer nestles beside Doreen Lawrence’s And Still I Rise. In history, Anne Frank and Mein Kampf are next to each other. What’s this at 23 in the best-sellers? A ‘book’ called Free books for Kindle. ‘No fluff,’ it says, ‘Just Kindle free books for download. Updated multiple times a day. £0.99 (includes VAT)’. This is doing my head in. I long for the past so I download Voices of the Somme, a collection of survivors’ memories, and am utterly lost in the trenches for four days. Add Comment | View Comments Wednesday, 4th January 2012 I’d ordered it weeks ago and there it was on the doorstep, a copy of Virginia Woolf’s The London Scene: Six Essays on London Life. Amazon of course, how did we ever manage without it? And not only is it exactly the book I wanted – one of the essays is a description written in 1931 of the place where I live - the edition is the first one of all six essays published together in the States. I draw it out of the envelope, run my finger tips over the plastic cover, read ‘DC Public Library, 403 7th Street SE Washington, DC’ on the back and see that it was taken out last in April 2011. How did those first DC readers feel as they held it? Did they bring it back to the library with regret? Were fines paid? Has it been stolen!? My head’s full of that wonderful aroma of old book. Somebody’s been scribbling in there in pencil. Who? The scribblings don’t make any sense, are they a code? I’m afraid if this were cricket, Kindle, proper books would have just scored a six. How could a plastic slate ever compete? Add Comment | View Comments Tuesday, 3rd January 2012 What books kept me from my new toy? A biog of Virginia Woolf was one. Very nicely written in beautiful hardback and such a good read that I’ve lent it on already. You can’t lend Kindle books, you can just recommend them or hand over the Kindle itself. Another round to proper books. I love lending books. You never do see them back again of course but everybody knows that and it’s all part of the generosity of it. As an author I’m supposed to get annoyed when several people can read a single copy of a novel but I learned to take it as a compliment when copies of What You See Is What You Get (published in Dublin) were scarce here in the UK. Three or more families were reading one copy, with parents, children and grandparents all joining in. Marvellous. Add Comment | View Comments Tuesday, 3rd January 2012 Another book that kept me from my Kindle was Bettany Hughes’ Helen of Troy. What a subject and what fantastic treatment of it, but what very small print. Last thing at night, with my eyes clouded ever so gently by wine, could I hold it up, let alone read? Two rounds to one with real books still in the lead … Add Comment | View Comments Monday, 2nd January 2012 Sorry I’ve ignored you here for a bit, I’ve been busy having an excellent family Christmas and New Year and hope you did too. Is it too late to wish you the very best for 2012? Well, I do anyway – health, love, prosperity and happiness to you and yours. And yes, my darling kids did band together to give me a Kindle. My daughter managed the operation and as a result has qualified herself to run the UN: secrecy, extraction of finance with menaces, blue berets, none of it daunted her. Job done. Me on the other hand? It’s taken me nearly a week to work out how to turn it on! Nothing to do with technology though. So many great books came my way via the Christmas tree that I’ve been busy on the sofa cuddling up to them. My youngest (23) had said ‘Why a Kindle? What’s the point? Books are great, you don’t have to plug them in or anything.’ And he’s right. First round to proper books without Kindle landing a single punch. Add Comment | View Comments Thursday, 8th December 2011 Right. That's it. I've had enough of gmail. As soon as it changed from googlemail to gmail, it kept crashing my laptop and now to get their security protection, they insist on having all my mobile details. I'm not doing that, so please NO MORE GMAIL or googlemail for me any more. It's rosemaryfurber@yahoo.co.uk until that turns out to be trouble too. Grrrr Add Comment | View Comments Tuesday, 6th December 2011 I’ve asked for a kindle for Christmas. I know, I know, what about the joy of a real book, the feel and smell? What about being able to lend books easily, the intimacy of doing that? Books hold so many memories too. Our book shelves are our life stories; by sliding out a particular volume and opening it, we’re remembering the nights when our father read to us, or a birthday, or when an old friend recommended a particular poem. With inherited books, how moving it is to see a comment in the margin, or just the crescent imprint of a thumbnail, now deceased. And how could we ever manage without author signings? But a really good friend told me the other day that he’d just read David Copperfield on kindle and the ‘pages’ just flew by. He’d never have bothered if it hadn’t been among the free stuff on his beloved kindle and it was wonderful to read Dickens without the depressing weight of all those pages still to come. He’s been telling me for ages that you can adjust the kindle’s print size, mark your pages and so on, and I’ve been listening with one ear. I don’t mind a bit of technology. I even read classic poems on an iPhone app. But I'm still a sucker for the real thing. Julian Barnes’ latest novel in hardback is a fine book to hold as well as to read. So is Morpurgo’s illustrated hardback of Warhorse, though you'd think that if they're spending all that effort on presentation, they'd pay a little more attention to the copy-editing. Anyway - if I buy a kindle, will I find that the experience of holding a real book will become enhanced, a gourmet experience, while the screen is kept for takeaways? Will my paperbacks become kindling? But Copperfield is no cheap takeaway and that is what's tipped my balance. Will I finally get around to reading War and Peace?? I’ll keep you posted. Add Comment | View Comments Monday, 5th December 2011 The Bermondsey Writing group has just finished a fantastic term with every-one’s work developing fast and some really excellent writing going on. Because we’re so close to Christmas now, our usual showcase will be on Sunday 8 January 2012, at 1.30pm. We’re all hoping to be lucky enough to meet the group’s youngest member that day, young Charlie Terrence Irwin who was born last Friday. Congratulations, Terry and Charlotte , he’s a lucky boy to have such lovely parents and he looks like an absolute darling in the photos. If you can’t make it to hear our readings that day, there are samples on Woolfson & Tay’s website now – bottom right on this page. I’m so proud of everybody. The next five sessions will be on Jan 15, 22, 29, Feb 5, 12, between 4 and 6pm. Add Comment | View Comments Monday, 5th December 2011 And in other news there's this in the Blackheath Bugle. Add Comment | View Comments Monday, 5th December 2011 Our Churchill College writing group has been going from strength to strength too. There’s something marvellously intimate about writing together, five or six of us at one table, so wrapped in our own imaginations that we can hardly hear the pens moving across pages. You’d never think so to look at us but there’s adventure going on while we write: we think we know where we’re going with it but surprises creep in all the time. There are two biographers in our group, several poets, at least three novelists, some screenwriters and a journalist or two, all in the bodies of five or six people. The momentum, the buzz was so great last term that we added an ‘encore’, a 5th session. If you have ever had anything to do with Churchill College, Cambridge – undergraduates, alums, staff, everybody's welcome - and would like to come along next term, we'll be there on Saturdays 18 & 25 February and 3 & 10 March, 2012 in the Bevin Room between 2 and 4pm. Add Comment | View Comments Wednesday, 30th November 2011 Autumn’s plucky sun and sparring clouds/ bring zest/ after summer languor. Add Comment | View Comments Tuesday, 11th October 2011 We don’t get to choose our biological family but we do choose our writing parents. A big part of the writing process is gathering writing parents. They're people who’ve survived a few more twists on that road and who see something valuable in our writing and stay alongside us, breathing encouragement. Agents and publishers are the best writing parents of course as they can physically midwive our work into the world – ten cheers for Anji Clarke, Maggie Hamand, Dennis Greig and Steph who do this for me, you’re all wonderful. And Seamus Cashman who lifted my first novel off the slush pile and sent me a contract out of the blue. The others? Well, there was a man who thought he knew everything about writing plays and bullied some of it into his ‘pupils’. I still use some of the crafty tricks he taught me in my fiction but mostly I learned how to give him a wide berth. And there was Jill Robinson. Jill is back in LA now but while she was in London, she and her poet husband Stuart would host writers in their home in Wimpole Street. We were always Jill’s writers, she wouldn’t dream of calling us pupils, and there would always be food. It was usually something informal and Italian and as we ate, we would each read our three pages of writing. Stuart and Jill would read too, and we got to see that there were times even for her when the writing wouldn’t come but that when it eventually did, it was richer and more felt than ever before. What a lot you can fit into just three pages, yet it’s not such a daunting length that you can’t come up with something if the deadline looms and nothing’s done. Why did Jill feed us? She grew up on the MGM lot in LA, run by her father at the time, so her home was always full of stars and writers. An excellent, sensitive writer herself, she reckons that writers are basically all convalescents. They need tenderness – mothering really - as well as self-discipline to produce their work. Well, everybody’s convalescent if you ask me. Are writers especially so? Not sure, but the best writing parents in my view combine tenderness, a sense of adventure, an unrelenting work ethic and above all, selflessness. They wouldn't dream of putting their imprimatura on your work. Jill is still nurturing writers in LA – lucky LA – and is producing an anthology over there. I'm delighted to have been asked to contribute. Add Comment | View Comments Monday, 10th October 2011 Want to come and join a free writing group in Churchill College, Cambridge? If you have any connection with the college, however slight, you’re invited to come along, free of charge. We’ll be gathering in college from this weekend; all levels of experience welcome. No need to bring anything but your writing kit and your imagination. Drop me a line on rosemaryfurber@yahoo.co.uk for more details. Add Comment | View Comments Sunday, 9th October 2011 This time last week I was on my way to the Netherlands to help my son settle in to take a PhD there. This Sunday I'm on my way to hear my magnificent writing group read their latest work in Bermondsey's Woolfson & Tay. This great little indie book shop is well worth a visit, so if you're anywhere near Bermondsey this afternoon and fancy lazing among books and fresh new writing, we'll be there from 1.30pm. Happy Sunday. Add Comment | View Comments Wednesday, 21st September 2011 Do you share my secret vice and write poetry now and again? You could win up to £2,500 if you have a go at this It’s the 5th Annual Troubadour International Poetry Prize, judged this year by Susan Wicks & David Harsent (with both judges reading all poems), sponsored by Cegin Productions. Submissions: by Mon 17th Oct 2011. Poems must be in English, must each be no longer than 45 lines, must be the original work of the entrant (no translations) and must not have been previously broadcast or published (in print or online). There’s no limit on the number of poems you can submit and the fee is just £5/€6EURO/$8USD per poem (Sterling/Euro/US-Dollars only) – details on the website. Best of luck x Add Comment | View Comments Monday, 5th September 2011 We’re all doomed. We writers are anyway. Here is the most comprehensive round-up of the dire future for writers in, where else, the Guardian. I found it on the net of course, so am as guilty as everyone else of wanting to read excellent work without paying for it. Getting it free didn’t make me feel any happier about the whole scenario, but what’s this? A plucky little David turns up who doesn’t give a damn about all this woe – yes, it’s my publisher Lapwing Poetry. Not only are they giving away (giving away!) samples of their books on their website but they now have a designated youtube channel for you to see Lapwing and its writers in action too. You won’t find me on there just yet – I have to work out how to do it first, and then get myself a haircut, then ... bring on those lights, writers can’t be shy these days. Besides, poetry and storytelling started off with the human voice, it’s only turning full circle. Will there ever be money in it ever again? Well, it's books that are dying, not writing. The country is crammed with passionate writers queueing up for good courses, trampling each other in the rush for agents and independent publishers. Getting published has always been like throwing your cooked spaghetti against the kitchen wall. If a few strands of your work stick, you're in business but a lot of it drops to the floor and always has done. Nobody knows what makes for success - if they did, there wouldn't be all those tales of classics being rejected umpteen times, and there wouldn't be so much rubbish around either - so all we can do is keeping writing, and keep thinking of new ways to get those words out there. Here's to Lapwing and all the Davids like them. Add Comment | View Comments Monday, 22nd August 2011 One Day by David Nicholls. Yes, I'm enjoying it too. Its structure dates back to Ancient Greece where they liked their romances to feature an impossibly beautiful and intelligent young couple who were not allowed to consummate their obvious love until they had each – separately – gone through a number of challenges to prove that they deserved each other. That's how it feels half way through anyway, and I can't wait to find out what Nicholls does with it. One Day manages to be technically modern too, and not just by being on kindle. A friend showed me her copy today. It's about half the size of a normal paperback, opens to show pages made of bible paper which you read long side first, down to the crease. Like a laptop screen. It's really handy actually and fits into any unfashionably small handbag. Add Comment | View Comments Sunday, 21st August 2011 This time next week – Sunday 28 August, 4 – 6pm to be precise - we'll be starting our writing group again at Woolfson & Tay in Bermondsey, south London's most stylish indie bookshop. We'll be looking at how to build a scene and give it shape. If you're stuck, how to get unstuck. Style and gaining your readers' confidence. Challenging preconceptions and cliches. Emotional truth and specificity. Motifs and imagery. Suspense and obstacles. High stakes and how to manage them. The sky's the limit and if there's anything else you'd like us to look at, just say. You can book through the website and as usual we will hear any work (up to 5 pages) that anyone has brought, in our usual friendly, supportive atmosphere. See you there! Add Comment | View Comments Friday, 19th August 2011 There used to be something called the Silly Season. It happened in August and was that phenomenon whereby nothing ever happens in the news when you're away on holiday. The papers would have precious little in them other than Princess Diana cavorting in the Med with some rich geezer or other. This year it's been all too different, recreational riots and all sorts, topped off with the fall of Tripoli last night. You don't get closer to real news than that. But in a sweet little town they call Coleraine, they've found space for a feature about me! Local news websites don't keep stuff for long so I've cut and paste here what Claire Savage of the Coleraine Chronicle has sent me by email. Thank you, Claire - LIGHTING UP THE LONDON SCENE, CLAIRE SAVAGE REPORTS: A SPECIAL archive collated by the British Library on 21st century life is to include a website from a former Portstewart woman. Rosemary Furber, who has authored a collection of novels and more recently, poetry, collects her thoughts as many do these days via her professional website. Although it presents information, as would be expected, on Rosemary’s work, the ‘news’ section of the site showcases what the writer does best. It is this online blog which no doubt caught the attention of the British Library, with its regular and insightful updates on her life as a London-based writer. Through the website, Rosemary discusses news, gives opinions on books and writing, offers advice to novice authors and blogs about what she’s been up to, giving a glimpse into London literary life. Of her British Library honour, she said she “never dreamt that could happen.” “They’re collecting websites that comment on how we live and I’m thrilled to be included,” said Rosemary. “I had no idea they did that sort of thing.” The author also recently appeared in the newly launched Greenwich Magazine, which profiled the Portstewart woman along with other London writers in a special feature. Although originally from Portstewart, Rosemary began her career in law, working as a city solicitor before realising her dream in writing. Ahead of her move into authorship however, she first delved into journalism. Her working life has subsequently taken some twists and turns over the years, something she discussed in more detail with students at her old stomping ground at Coleraine High School last year. Having previously penned four books, Rosemary’s most recent publication - ‘Sweet Seventeens’ - is new territory for the author, as it is her first poetic work. The poems, published by Lapwing Publications in Belfast, are just 17 syllables long but, said Rosemary, they “cross a wide range of emotions.” “I could not be more chuffed that Lapwing Publications in Belfast has published them as one of their exquisite hand-bound pamphlets,” she said. “There’s something about 17 syllables. There’s something about it that works in different cultures. Mine are often little dramas - that’s what people seem to like about them.” Although still hesitant about her poetry, Rosemary’s obvious talent has not gone unnoticed by others in the industry and she has read her work before sizeable audiences at the Troubadour Cafe at Earls Court. “There’s a little cellar underneath where Anne-Marie Fyfe from Cushendall runs a poetry group,” she told The Chronicle. “At the end of each term she invites poets to come and read one poem each. She’s invited me for the last three or four times. It’s great - it’s perhaps the biggest audience for poetry outside South Bank. I still feel that my poetic licence is lost in the post, but it’s fun and actually, there’s a huge poetry scene.” Rosemary has also been flexing her journalistic muscles of late, interviewing a number of high profile and successful authors during ‘An Evening with Rosie’. This is a new monthly literary event she runs at an independent book store just recently opened in London. In November she spoke with Whitbread and multiple prize winner Patrick Neate, discussing the situation in Zimbabwe, where he was returning to live with his wife. Rosemary has since interviewed a string of other authors, including Michael Foley, BBC senior foreign news correspondent Jill McGivering and poet and ‘grande dame of literature’, Maureen Duffy. She also runs a writing group at the book store, within which she guides and offers advice to new writers and which has seen great success to date. Rosemary is also currently compiling a second collection of her poetry and is “going well” with a new novel. She said: “There are three rules to creative writing but nobody knows what they are! All people need is encouragement.” Add Comment | View Comments Monday, 25th July 2011 Years ago I had a conversation that was a bit more gruesome than the usual party chat. A forensic psychiatrist and I were discussing mad and bad: Peter Sutcliffe the Yorkshire Ripper was mad while Dennis Nielsen was plain bad. I had to ask: wasn't the performance of revolting acts, outside normal human experience, evidence of madness of some sort, whether there were voices in the head or not? How could somebody boil down corpses for fun and be sane? The psychiatrist explained that some people were plain bad, not mad, and it was her job to help a court to distinguish the two so that the right choices could be made for their future. I hadn't yet heard the expression 'personality disorder' and, tragically, it sounds as if poor Norway is about to explore the difference between insanity and personality disorder afresh. Michael Morpurgo spoke on the Today programme this morning about the Norwegian massacres and how fiction can help us prepare for disasters like this. He mentioned Beowulf's tussle with Grendel and concluded that we all have to keep a constant eye out for monsters and be ready to fight them wherever we find them. Well, yes, all that evil needs to triumph is indeed for good people to stay silent. But I disagree strongly that we should live every minute in watchful fear. I grew up in Northern Ireland and have had to see my children grow up in an atmosphere of world-wide terror too. They're the generation that came home from school to see on television the Twin Towers collapsing into dust. And one thing is clear to me: safety is a treasure as beautiful as love and it's a waste of both to coop ourselves up, worrying that evil is always round the corner. Lightning does strike but let's take a walk in the woods anyway. As Chopra says, the healthiest response to life is joy. Add Comment | View Comments Friday, 8th July 2011 Life imitated art yesterday on Question Time when Hugh Grant, who played a version of our Prime Minister in Love Actually, stepped up to take on the tabloid thugs in the way that our politicians should have been doing and didn't. Throughout the programme he was well-informed, well-mannered and yes, well cute. The man has substance! I was already impressed by his piece in the New Statesman in April, and by the courageous way he held his ground when Paul McMullan subsequently tried to cosy up to him in this interview, like a bare-knuckle fighter pretending to hug and make up to get closer, before delivering a blow about Grant failing to pay for his beer. Grant's response – from 3.30 mins - was brilliant. And on Question Time last night an ex-Sun reporter was all ladsy quips about Murdoch being the Sun King and Wade/Brooks being a 'red top' until he felt he was losing audience appeal, when he couldn't resist bringing up Grant's Divine Brown incident years ago. It was a low tactic in the circumstances and Grant's reaction was perfect: though clearly wounded, he just let the man display his own true nature and the audience loved it. Grant had come to the Question Time studio well armed too. No actory air-head behaviour here, he'd consulted an ex-Attorney General about the legalities of Parliamentary and police inquiries running concurrently, and his disclosures about the tenor of the new investigative police team were most useful. This is about so much more than 200 job losses so don't lose heart, Hugh, keep fighting. I'll be there with my magic sponge if you need me. Add Comment | View Comments Thursday, 7th July 2011 Here's a little book that packs a big punch: Bonnie Greer's Langston Hughes: The Value of Contradiction. We're all full of contradictions and Greer explains why it was utterly logical for Langston Hughes, the poet laureate of Black Americans through their struggle for civil rights, to be a communist in the McCarthy days and for him to have turned witness. It's an elegant book and a pleasure to read, most of all when Greer is admitting that her own generation just might have dismissed Hughes too hastily. Add Comment | View Comments Thursday, 7th July 2011 You know about the rejections of literary classics, I'm sure, like these borrowed from Rotten Rejections, which should be by every writer's bedside . But what about those wonderful first pieces we write but don't get published? Agents call them calling cards, and you need a damned good one to get an agent in the first place. I was at a fabulous concert the other night of some Brandenburg concertos and I nearly choked on my house red when I read in the programme notes that Bach never heard those famous concerts himself, and neither did anybody else for over a century after his death. He wrote them 'as a resume for a new job', and it was a job he did not get! The recipient probably didn't bother to have them performed, and might not even have opened the score. How can anyone tell? The same way we writers can tell when our work comes back in pristine condition, with the Monopoly tenner slipped in three pages before the end still snug and undisturbed. Bach obviously didn't lose heart and neither should we. Add Comment | View Comments Thursday, 7th July 2011 I love The Week. It lightens my Fridays, or did until this week when I spotted an ad for kindles taking up the whole of its back cover. I'd been having the kindle debate that very day with 20-something Hilary who has no time for kindle at all. She loves the feel, cost, smell, touch, ethos of books and will never be deflected from them, she says. I said what I usually say, that it's not the device that harms books but the way amazon uses profits from other things to slash prices and undercut other book sellers, leaving us writers, booksellers and publishers adrift in a world that wants it all for nothing. I wouldn't care if people chose to read what I write on an anteater's backside as long as they paid a fair price for it. That said, I do have poetry apps on my iPhone, mainly for the work of dead poets, as it's free. While other people are doing unspeakable things to cartoon birds beside me at the bus stop, I'm probably resting my mind on Yeats' collar-bone of a hare ... on a screen. Writing will survive somehow. After all, computer games haven't killed the fresh air sports like tennis, have they? Add Comment | View Comments Thursday, 7th July 2011 Twitter. No, I'm not on it, thank you. People keep telling me I should, what with my poems being only 17 syllables, but how my heart sinks every time another friend's name appears with that sinister little @ beside their name on facebook. It feels like when you discover that a friend has discovered cocaine: in no time they're banging on about themselves from a great height dozens of times a day, regardless of whether anybody else gives a damn. Hang on, isn't that a bit like blogging ... Add Comment | View Comments Thursday, 7th July 2011 HOT NEWS - no, not about the closure of that ghastly rag which was always about scavenging from bins and gusset-sniffing, even in what they're now calling its glory days. Fresh from Anne-Marie Fyfe, it's the "fifth annual Troubadour International Poetry Prize and the exciting news that (thanks to sponsorship from Cegin Productions who so-generously funded last year's London New Poetry Award) our first prize is now £2,500! So what else is special about the Troubadour Poetry Prize (apart from the chance of joining the long and excellent list of prizewinners from our first four years, see www.coffeehousepoetry.org/poems)? How about? - all poems read by both judges; I believe you submit poems because you've faith in our judges so I don't use sifters to select and forward the 'likeliest' 100 or so; and I only take on judges with enough enthusiasm for poetry to happily read the two-to-three-thousand submissions we receive each year; - v. speedy turnaround; many of you will want your poems out there working for you in the next competition, next magazine submission, so we ensure they're only tied up for 5 weeks max; - Troubadour Prize Night, where all 23 prizewinners are invited to read at a London-poetry-world celebration in the famous Troubadour cellar-club, to hear why judges picked those particular poems, to read alongside those distinguished judges, and to collect their prizewinners cheque (and a 2012 Spring season-ticket); - our top three prizewinners will also be offered a showcase Troubadour reading in a forthcoming season; - and, of course, this year, there's the chance to be the first to win the Troubadour £2,500 International Poetry Prize... What more incentive could a poet want? Time to get creative! All best wishes, and good luck! Anne-Marie" Add Comment | View Comments Sunday, 12th June 2011 Old feminists never die, they just keep marching. I was on the slutwalk in London yesterday, in jeans and a t-shirt, and I loved the wit of it all. The young organisers know that even in 2011 women still have to take their clothes off to get noticed. It was definitely not just for the young: the woman in a tutu and thong with NO written in red lipstick on each of her bare buttocks was, I’d guess, older than me. It was one of those old-fashioned marches where you get tooted by the buses, cheered by crowds, listen to somebody in the distance mumbling into a microphone and then head off to Pret for coffee before home. No trashing MacDonalds, no kettling – we were just there to make a point. The point being? Well, I’ve always been an optimist and still believe that most men are nice. When they see a woman who’s drunk or asleep or otherwise vulnerable, they’ll help her or leave her alone, as appropriate. As they would for any male friend. They can see her practically comatose in front of them and it wouldn’t even cross their minds to have sex with her. And then there are the others. They see someone in a weak position, or (more likely) they weaken her – alcohol, drugs, emotional blackmail, intimidation, violence, the range is enormous - and these men will get a buzz for days out of what they do next. Taking advantage was a useful old phrase; these men ‘take advantage’ of the greatest vulnerability which is that women generally don’t speak up. We were all jollying along yesterday when I found myself beside a young woman with her mouth taped up. On the tape were the words ‘Still not brave enough to tell the police’. Tears stood in my eyes at the sight of her there in her demure dress. Why? Because court is a dreadful business, the last thing you need when you’re trying to recover from this most humiliating crime. But almost every day we read or hear in the news about another woman daring to take her attacker to court. Ten years ago DKS, former head of the International Monetary Fund, would have probably bought his way out of that incident in a New York hotel and we would have heard nothing about it. Yes, I know he’s innocent until he’s found guilty but my point still holds. The culture around rape is changing. More and more women are ready to rip that gag off their faces and bring out the truth. Nice men will be in full support, as they always have been. Add Comment | View Comments Monday, 6th June 2011 How do you get published? Where do you start? Here’s a bit of free advice because you keep asking. I can’t do paragraphing on this site, I’m afraid, so it comes as a great big slab. First thing you do is have a long look at The Writers & Artists Yearbook, online or in hard copy. There you’ll find comprehensive lists of agents, publishers, newspapers and magazines telling you what they’re looking for and where and how to send it. The articles are brilliant too, giving you advice from the coal face in specific areas. Make a list of the agents and publishers who are asking for your kind of thing. There is no point in wasting your blood, sweat, tears and postage stamps on the others. Then – and take your time over this – look at their websites carefully. Get a feel for their ethos, then look at the detail. Do they have a submissions page? If what it says clashes with the Writers & Artists yearbook, trust the website. Some will ask for 20 pages, others for 3 chapters, some a synopsis, others not. If you don’t get this right, they won’t bother to read what you send them even if it came to you channelled from Tolstoy. Now, pick your first targets. It’s hard to say whether you should start with agents or publishers so I’d choose a mixture of both. With agents, it’s best to try some new and some old agencies, somebody junior in one and somebody middle-ranking in another. Don’t bother with the top jocks anywhere unless you know them personally; they’re busy and probably haven’t taken on a new client for years. With publishers, only the independent ones will take a submission from you direct but lots of them do want to hear from you, so have a go. Now you’re ready to choose what you’re going to send. With a novel, the chapters they want (how many? check their website) must be consecutive, not chapters you’ve chosen at random. They want to see how you build things. Keep the chapters shortish too, a stream of consciousness for 200 pages won’t go down well. With non-fiction, you’re offering a flavour of your style and approach and that can come from different parts of your book if you like. With poetry, you’re also trying to show your range, your power, so give as broad a selection as you can, emphasising any prize-winners you have. It’s time now to think about your covering letter. This is the most important part of the whole exercise as it might well be the only thing that gets read. I’m being honest here, and agents and publishers will be nodding as they read this. If you have a name to drop, do it in the first 2 lines and then forget it. Never mention that your mum or nan really loves your work, you’re being professional here. Your letter must be short. One side of A4 is best, nobody reads a second page. In your intro (after the name-drop), say why you’ve chosen to write to that agent or publisher. Why is your work apt for them, and for the particular person you’re writing to. (That agent specialises in thrillers or memoir or whatever.) A bit of grovelling (you really love something they’ve produced) doesn’t go amiss. Next par: sum up what you’re sending. In under 50 exciting words, describe it generally and summarise the gist. Think Unique Selling Point, why the world needs your thriller. In non-fiction, show that you know which section of the market you're aiming for, and that your book will fill a vital gap. In the next paragraph, briefly give your writing CV. Don’t talk yourself up unduly or be tricksy, and the joke about attaching monopoly money has worn a bit thin. No need to mention the day job unless it’s relevant. Teaching is useful if you’re writing for children, as is being a priest if you’re writing a religious thriller. Always enclose an SAE if it’s asked for. Then, when you’re absolutely ready to send it out ... put it all away for a bit. Take a weekend to cool down and go over it once more. Is it all the very best you can do? Check the spelling and layout again. One ‘their’ when it should be ‘they’re’ could kill it. Bouncing it off a trustworthy friend can help, though not the family. Trust me on this. Is it finally ready to go? Yes? Then pick up the phone. Speak to each one of the offices you’re sending your work to and ask if your selected person still there. Firms merge and people move on before websites and the yearbook are updated. And check very carefully how they spell their names. Then ... fire and forget. Away it all goes. Give yourself a treat and then forget about it for at least three months. When you’re in a publishing office and see the size of their unsolicited submissions pile, you’ll know why. Carry on with your writing and don’t contact them for 3 - 4 months. Never EVER make a nuisance of yourself. Don’t be downhearted if it bounces back quickly. Rejections can be no more than the combination of a good lunch and the size of that slush pile and need not be taken personally. If a reply from an agent or publisher spells YOUR name right and has constructive advice in it, frame it for your loo and act on it. It’s gold dust. Finding a publisher or agent is like finding a lover – it can take time but you only need one and the right one is the making of you. Good luck! Add Comment | View Comments Wednesday, 1st June 2011 The British Library is archiving this website. Well, I never dreamt that could happen. They’re collecting websites that comment on how we live and I’m thrilled to be included. Add Comment | View Comments Tuesday, 31st May 2011 I was in bed with flu and a Jilly Cooper novel when Michelle Obama was here last week but I would like to applaud her loud and long. She has done an excellent thing in bringing those girls to Oxford, and good for Christchurch for hosting the occasion. By being there to smell those walls, feel that grass under their feet, breathe among that fantastic architecture with Michelle Obama’s towering presence beside them, those young women have taken a huge step already. A long time ago, in a galaxy far away (the north coast of Northern Ireland) my grammar school headmistress encouraged me to have a go at Cambridge. Nobody at the school had been before and we had no idea how to put in an application. (The school’s careers advice consisted of two files, teaching and nursing.) I wound up at Churchill College, the first college to decide to admit women, and spent my first year in terror that I was there by mistake. I thought I’d be asked politely to make way for someone from a posh school, but it didn’t happen. Cambridge was surreal for me, oh yes, not least when I realised how rich some of the other undergrads were, and how different their route to the place had been. Around 10% of the undergrads were female in those days, and the proportion of state school kids was about the same. Oxbridge is now more than 50% female (thanks to the few colleges that remain female only) and between 52 and 55% of the British undergrads come from state schools. Yet the image is still that it’s full of David Camerons. It’s not! And even if it were, how is anything elitist ever going to change unless people outside the elite make a point of getting in there too? So if you're thinking about going to university and somebody mentions Oxbridge to you, please don't dismiss the idea too fast. If other universities are going to charge £9K a year in tuition fees too, Oxbridge can actually be the best value: you can live cheaply in college and that excellent teaching is on your doorstep or just a bike ride away. Why bother? Well, my answer to that is the same as when people ask why bother to have children – because you get more of everything. There’ll be more work than at other universities, more stress, more challenge, yes. That’s because you’ll be taught by the very best, the academics who are at the cutting edge of your subject on a daily basis. You can also try all sorts of sports and fun things free and because of the college system, it doesn’t matter if you’re trying it out for the first time. I was resolutely anti-sport at school, was talked into rowing at college and absolutely loved it. They’re inundated by very bright applicants and can't see the wood for the genuises, so it's not your fault if you get turned down. And you never know, they might get lucky and choose you! So don’t be daunted. Even if your time there turns out to have nothing to do with what you ultimately offer the world, have a go. You're worth it. Add Comment | View Comments Saturday, 14th May 2011 Just back from signing ten copies of Sweet Seventeens in Piccadilly Waterstone’s. What an honour! There’s the pile of my wee poems on a table between Carol Ann and Seamus - I tell you, I had to have a lie down to recover as soon as I got home. They’re on the first floor in the poetry section. Add Comment | View Comments Wednesday, 20th April 2011 Two fantastic readings are coming up soon, both at Woolfson & Tay in Bermondsey. One of the greatest thrills, I think, is to hear new writing, freshly minted, polished and read aloud by the author just for you. On Saturday 30 April at 2pm (after you’ve recovered from the royal nuptials, or from ignoring them) you can hear my Three Pages class reading from their works in progress. Frissons and fun are guaranteed, and memorable writing of all kinds. And on Sat 21 May at 3pm, contributors to Words Made Flesh will be reading too. Words Made Flesh is a selection of chapters and samples from Maggie Hamand’s Complete Creative Writing Course and I see that this collector's item is out of stock on amazon again. W & T will be able to put that right for you. I’m on the podium for both events and they’re both free. That's at Woolfson & Tay in Bermondsey Square, not far from London Bridge and Southwark stations. See you there! Add Comment | View Comments Wednesday, 20th April 2011 Lapwing Poetry in Belfast have gone digital in a big way. It’s nothing to do with publishing my Sweet Seventeens last November, they’ve decided that it’s the only way to go. How do you feel about ebooks? You can email me on rosemaryfurber@googlemail.com to sound off if you like. I’m still doing the London Tube Test, where I look down the underground carriage, any line, and count how many people are reading books as opposed to kindles or similar. It’s a bit like the motorway/ cricket game where an Eddie Stobart lorry is a wicket and I’ve yet to see more than one kindle in action on any given day. But a book is a design classic and according to the Tube Test, we still love it. I certainly do, even more than I love proper pencils that have a little rubber on the top. You can read a book in the bath and on the beach, keep your tickets and receipts in it and share it around all your family and friends, like the intellectual and emotional treasure it is. Yet ... yet ... I love my Iphone too and one of its big advantages is that you can download free classic poetry to your heart’s content. When I saw Dennis and Rene Greig of Lapwing in Belfast last December, we were chatting in the Europa about Prufrock, as you do, and out came my iphone to help us along with the text. In the end, it’s the words that matter and who cares how people read them? (Getting money for them is another matter and that’s why agents were born.) So everything in Lapwing’s magnificent catalogue is available as an ebook now, with a ‘BOGOF’ buy one, get one free policy. You can still buy everything as an old-fashioned book as well and their site is very welcoming and easy. Lapwing’s finest innovation is to offer previews of every book – you can see the first 12 pages of mine, for example – which allows for hours of happy browsing without leaving your chair. I still like to spend an evening outside with a poetry book and a glass of white and some olives beside me, but burrowing through Lapwing’s previews has a dark illicit feel that I thoroughly recommend. Add Comment | View Comments Tuesday, 29th March 2011 Mothers’ Day is this weekend, what better to give us than a book? My 10 suggestions for this Sunday would be ... Hilary Mantel’s Every Day is Mother's Day, Edna St Vincent Millay's sonnets, Dorothy Parker (the Portable DP is my favourite), Wendy Cope (any of them really but I think I still like Serious Concerns best), A Mother's Eye by Anne Roiphe (an honest look at how on earth you can be feminist when you're a mother; it touched my heart years ago and I reread it regularly), Tristan and Iseult by Rosemary Sutcliffe (romance to melt the sternest cynic of any age, and nice and short for the busy mum), Goddesses in Every Woman: a new psychology of women by Shinoda Bolen (we're not just domestic goddesses, we can be inspired by those magnificent Ancient Greek and Roman goddesses too), The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton (about courage and missed opportunities), A Scattering by Christopher Reid (Reid's suite of poems to his late wife won the Costa book of the year 2009) and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by Anita Loos, because this book is nothing like the film and is still one of the funniest books ever written. It also shows that the blonde thing has been around a while. Happy Mums’ Day! Add Comment | View Comments Monday, 28th March 2011 Greenwich (London SE10) has more history than it can consume locally (to borrow Saki’s phrase). It also has a lovely lot of authors and a new local magazine called Greenwich celebrates this with an excellent article about us all here. I'm on page 24. Add Comment | View Comments Monday, 28th March 2011 Off to read some of my poems (short and sweet, 17 syllables max as usual) at the Troubadour in Earl’s Court from 8 tonight. Anne-Marie Fyfe runs the poetry club in the basement and winds up each term with a party where invited poets read their work. The theme is news and news makers tonight. Please come along if you're in the area, should be hot stuff. Add Comment | View Comments Monday, 14th March 2011 Days don’t come much better than this: I called into Greenwich Waterstone’s to scribble in the cafe for an hour or so and found myself signing copies of Sweet Seventeens before I left, AND being shown their stock of The Most Intimate Place and You’re Nicked. One of the greatest things about Waterstone’s is that each branch still has discretion to stock the staff’s own favourites and to support local authors. Ever since my first launch there at Greenwich – of What You See Is What You Get in 2005, when that branch was Ottakars - they have been fantastic to me. They’re really lovely people too! Thanks, guys. Or you can get copies by post by clicking on the titles here. Add Comment | View Comments Wednesday, 9th March 2011 My First Pagers, I’m so proud of them! Their readings at Woolfson & Tay on Saturday were magnificent. It's one of life's greatest pleasures to hear writing that's fresh minted - thank you very much to everybody who came. My Three Pages course starts this Sunday afternoon from 4 to 6. No need to bring anything to the first session except your imagination, and maybe your favourite pen. We’ll do some scribbling together, talk about what we write and want to write, and have a lot of fun. Please take a minute to book through the website or by calling 0207 407 9316 if you'd like to come. It'll be great to see you. Add Comment | View Comments Wednesday, 2nd March 2011 Two fantastic 'Evenings with Rosie' are coming up at Woolfson & Tay in Bermondsey, as cool as a baby polar bear sucking Haagen Dazs through a frozen straw: On 19 April it's BLAKE MORRISON.Blake's coming to Bermondsey to talk about The Lost Weekend, his exciting and disturbing novel which rocked me right back in my chair. Blake's not just a novelist, he's written in just about every other literary genre there is, and I'm hoping that together we can pick his brains about a whole range of things. On 17 March MICHAEL ARDITTI is coming to talk about Jubilate, which is taking London by storm. Michael's novels always take spiritual questing and questioning into new, entertaining and heart-rending directions and I think this is his best yet. Please take a minute to make a booking, online or by phoning 020 7407 9316. It helps the shop no end. Cheers and see you soon. Rosie x Add Comment | View Comments Saturday, 26th February 2011 Saw the latest True Grit the other night and came out missing John Wayne as much as if he were a father I hadn’t seen in twenty years. In my time I’ve admired (trans: lusted after) Jeff Bridges as much as any woman and I’d had high hopes, so what was it about the Bridges / Coen version that didn’t engage me? I ordered a DVD of the 1969 version and a couple of days later there I was sitting with a glass of 10 year old Bushmills, ready to find out. There’s plenty wrong with the Wayne version. There’s the mawkish Glen Campbell music backing the credits for a start, although Campbell himself was beautifully cast as LaBoeuf (pronounced LaBeef). There was a wholesome, Touchstone-style tendency to shrug past the violence as if we were in a cartoon too. Yet there it was, as clear as the ping of a whiskey cork spat into a chamber pot, the reason why Wayne got his Oscar for playing Rooster and I suspect Bridges won’t: Wayne’s tenderness. Because of his own huge career, Wayne didn’t have to tell viewers that he could ride and was handy with a gun, we all knew that. So from the start, he was tender with Mattie. As Rooster does in the book, he calls Mattie ‘little sister’ and means it. There’s a gentle fondness in their relationship, growing with their mutual respect, and in Wayne’s performance it’s underscored by his own style of irony. When I bought the book (to settle the matter) and read the dialogue in the court case where Mattie first sees what Rooster’s made of, it’s Wayne’s voice that was in my head while I was reading every line. Even the way he pronounces ‘LaBeef’ has such tease in the last syllable that it’s impossible to dislike him. This is a trick Bridges found harder to pull off. Both Wayne and Bridges are far too old for the role – Rooster is just over 40 when Mattie hires him – and both versions of the film get his drinking right. Where the Coens justify their film is in the ending. I won’t spoil it if you haven’t seen it yet, but the 1969 version ties everything up as neat as the bow on Mattie’s church bonnet. The Coens’ version follows the novel, and is far more moving. Donna Tartt says in the introduction to a new edition of the novel (out of print for years) that after the 1969 film, the novel died away. So the Coens are performing a service to literature. One to film too? Personally I wouldn’t bother to see their version twice, except maybe that last ten minutes. Add Comment | View Comments Tuesday, 22nd February 2011 First Page was a small group, all of them bursting to write but unsure how to start. In no time they were writing reams. I wrote beside them, as I do, and each week our fictional characters broadened and deepened, we took our imaginations into different places and moods, explored point of view and story structure, They wrote well too, we had a lot of laughs and I watched the writers around me expand in confidence. This Saturday we’re reading aloud to anybody who happens to be in Woofson & Tay in Bermondsey Square at around noon. Please come and experience this wonderful, unusual book shop and witness for yourself the alchemy of creative writing, that even when you don’t expect it, there it is: something new under the sun.If you missed First Page and fancy trying something similar, Three Pages is starting on 13 March. Sunday afternoons again, between 4 and 6. Add Comment | View Comments Monday, 21st February 2011 Two anthologies are coming up with my words in them. One is a collection of chapters and short stories from my publisher Maggie Hamand’s creative writing course. It’s called Words Made Flesh and I’m honoured to be in print beside some fantastic writers whom I’ve got to know and love. The other anthology is Ruth O’Callaghan’s latest selection from Lumen. Ruth restricts each of us to just one poem, which in my case means just the 17 syllables. I’m thrilled though, the company between those covers will be marvellous. Both anthologies will be launched some time next month. Not sure of the date yet but I’ll keep you posted. Youtube is fantastic if you ever fancy a poetry fix, by the way. There’s the likes of this, for example, as relevant as ever. Add Comment | View Comments Saturday, 19th February 2011 Great news, SWEET SEVENTEENS will be in stock in Greenwich Waterstone’s soon and has made it onto the Waterstone’s website. I’ve been reading at various poetry events in London too. It wasn’t my idea, Dennis of Lapwing suggested it, and I thought I’d die of embarrassment (poetry’s always been my secret vice) until I got there and discovered some of the nicest people in the world having a really good time. You can find me at Camden and Lumen Poetry run by the mighty Ruth O’Callaghan, and there’s the Troubadour of course, run by Anne-Marie Fyfe from Cushendall. She proves that a poetic piss-up can indeed be run in a wine bar in Earl’s Court but don’t ask the bar staff what’s going on, they’ve already got their hands full. The poetry action is on the coffpoetry site. All cheap and cheerful and yet another fascinating subterranean layer of London’s cultural life. Add Comment | View Comments Friday, 18th February 2011 Secret Cinema last night, 1940s style, and I’m not allowed to say what we saw or where but Time Out is absolutely right: ‘the multiplex is dead, long live Secret Cinema!’ There’s the dressing up for a start. Hundreds of us in a London High Street looking so smart, I was almost tempted to take up smoking again for the sake of authenticity. Vintage shops were sold out by lunchtime and my companion was advised to stick a flower behind her ear and buy red lipstick. We ate rabbit pie, drank G & Ts and, sitting there under proper old lightbulbs in my proper old coat, I was asked if I’d ‘mind tirribly taking awff your hat’. Chin chin, darlings, it’s here, but don’t say who told you ... Add Comment | View Comments Wednesday, 12th January 2011 Have you always wanted to write fiction but don't know where to start? Have you begun and wound up feeling discouraged? My practical course at Bermondsey's coolest book shop will get rid of those first page blues. We will explore getting started, keeping the flow and writing anywhere, any time. The first session is THIS SUNDAY 4 - 6pm. You can book through Woolfson & Tay's website. Add Comment | View Comments Wednesday, 1st December 2010 Out of the hundreds of thousands of books published in the UK and Ireland each year, last year only 1020 of them were poetry and only ‘a very few hundred’ of those were new stuff apparently. I'm honoured to be in this year's crop and the courier who delivered copies of Sweet Seventeens yesterday through snow and ice got a big welcome. The books look and feel just beautiful. As I took copies in to Greenwich Waterstone's today - it felt like introducing my new baby to some best friends - what did I see on the shelves upstairs but You're Nicked, written by moi in 2007! It's sold enough to be on sale in every Waterstone's, whoop! So, once the Greenwich branch finds a way to help Sweet Seventeens through their order system, there'll be THREE books of mine for sale there. Thank you, Greenwich Waterstone's, you're wonderful. Add Comment | View Comments Sunday, 28th November 2010 On Tuesday I’ll hold my Lapwing pamphlet SWEET SEVENTEENS in my hands for the first time. So exciting! Dennis Greig of Lapwing (the only other person who’s seen them so far) says they’re ‘very refreshing ... very unusual to see so many big issues treated so neatly and humorously’. Please click here to ORDER COPIES FROM LAPWING. No amazon for this I’m afraid, Dennis explains why here. Happy shopping - may all your Christmases be sweet x Add Comment | View Comments Wednesday, 24th November 2010 I’m typing through my first hangover in ages so this will be short. What an excellent evening that was! Prize-winning writer Patrick Neate is moving against the flow in that he’s swapping Hammersmith for Zimbabwe soon as his permanent home, to allow his wife to be closer to her family and their baby to be brought up there. Fresh back from visiting them in Zimbabwe, he gave a wonderfully challenging talk about what it’s really like to live there. The chat moved from the book shop on to the Del Aziz next door and as the wine came and went, the main gist seemed to be that the most poisonous inheritance we have from the 19th century is a white tendency to patronise Africa and all its people, even while being aware that we shouldn’t. Excellent stuff, arising from Patrick’s books which pull off the almost impossible trick of being well informed, beautifully written, tragic, hilarious and impeccably cool. Very many thanks to the shop for hosting so beautifully and to everybody who made the journey, it was wonderful to see you. Pictures are here - thanks, Fran. Add Comment | View Comments Thursday, 18th November 2010 Post-traumatic Stress Disorder: my father reminded me of the scene in Life on Mars where one of the team gets injured in an explosion and has come back to work. The John Simms character is worried that it might be too early, the guy might be suffering from PTSD. ‘A bellow from Glenister’, my father says, ‘the man’s a bloody hero and you’re telling me he has the clap!’ Add Comment | View Comments Thursday, 18th November 2010 Jean O’Brien has just won first prize in the Arvon International for her poem ‘Merman’. Congratulations to her. In 1992 Lapwing’s third pamphlet was of her work and they published her again in 2004 with ‘Reach’. My own wee pamphlet Sweet Seventeens is all set for publication by Lapwing now and copies should be in my hands in about a fortnight. It’s been a joy to have Dennis edit my words, I’m amazed by his speed and could not be more chuffed to be a Lapwing poet. In time for Christmas too! Add Comment | View Comments Thursday, 18th November 2010 On Tues 23 Nov at 7pm I'll be interviewing Patrick Neate at Bermondsey Square's new book shop Woolfson & Tay. Patrick won the Whitbread (now Costa prize) for Twelve Bar Blues in 2001 and has kept the prizes and renown flowing ever since. When they were both 18 he fell in love with a Zimbabwean girl and they are now married with a baby. When people seem to be leaving Zimbabwe in droves, they are planning to go and live over there very soon. Before he goes, Patrick's going to talk with me about Zimbabwe in particular and Africa in general. What is the healthiest way for Africa to tackle its problems? Does Western aid get it right? Should Africa be ‘rebranded’ in the Western mind before we can really be of any help? Please come and join in, it promises to be a lively ride. £5 includes wine and a book discount, and you get the chance to explore this fantastic new shop. Please book through the website, it’ll help the shop manage the evening for us. Thank you, it’ll be great to see you. Add Comment | View Comments Tuesday, 2nd November 2010 Variety. It's the zest and spice of everything that's nice, and I'm still reeling from a week of what MacNiece called the drunkenness of things being various. On Tuesday Bermondsey's new bookshop Woolfson & Tay hosted my Evening With the BBC foreign correspondent Jill McGivering where we discussed women on the front line in Helmand province – pictures here, scroll down and you'll find them – and last Saturday they invited me back to scare the wits out of some children and their parents. I love reading to children, they’re the best audience in the world once you whisper and get them to notice that you’re there. The whole of Bermondsey Square was having a Halloween frightfest, so in an empty few minutes I toddled off and had my Tarot cards read, the gist of which was that if I keep breathing, I could live for a nice long time. Variety, I said, you’d like more? OK, how about this? I'll write anything and a few years ago I was writing books of daft court cases designed to while away the time in the smallest room. (Not just mine, anybody's.) Well, last week I woke up to an email from a wonderful Belfast publisher who wants to publish a pamphlet of some little poems I’ve been writing. They’re very little poems, 17 syllables each in fact. Lapwing Poetry are fantastic and I’m thrilled to bits. From bog books to poetry, who'd have thought it? Will keep you posted. Add Comment | View Comments Tuesday, 12th October 2010 Good old Churchill college! Three Nobel prizes out of the latest batch. They've invited me to join their Alumni Association's committee as the 70s rep, by the way. If you were at Churchill in the 70s and would like to be back in touch, I'm on rosemaryfurber@googlemail.com Add Comment | View Comments Monday, 11th October 2010 Kishwar Desai's grandmother 'buried six daughters' believing that daughters were nothing but a burden. So Kishwar herself might not have been born. Her novel WITNESS THE NIGHT tackles infanticide and foeticide of baby girls in Asian society across the world and she and I will be discussing it at Woolfson & Tay in Bermondsey Square THIS THURSDAY AT 7PM. You're very welcome to join us. If you missed it, here are some photos. Add Comment | View Comments Friday, 8th October 2010 On my desk here among the usual selection of tea mugs, half-read books, staplers and all that, are two orders of service. Each of them has a photograph of a beloved friend I’ve known for thirty years or more. They both died this summer, one in a traffic accident, the other of cancer, both leaving legacies of deep love and generosity as well as adventurousness of spirit. I am bereft without them but my loss is nothing to that of their bereaved children just starting on adulthood, dazed far too early by how short and precarious our lives are. There’s no fairness in these things, never was. Sometimes it feels as if all that keeps us going is our sorrow. Add Comment | View Comments Wednesday, 22nd September 2010 The exciting hub of south east London’s cultural life has to be Bermondsey Square’s new bookshop Woolfson & Tay, run by Fran and Shivaun. It’s only been open a week and last night was the first of my monthly Evenings with Rosie. We talked about Michael Foley’s The Age of Absurdity, a book that not only proves how absurd life is these days in hilarious style but reminds us of some very old fashioned remedies for unhappiness. Like Seneca, he’d rather make fun of life than whinge about it – no Grumpy Old Man stuff here. Michael calls this book his ‘madness’, and is amazed that something so scholarly is doing so well. But it wears its learning lightly and is a terrific read. Our discussion took off at a rolling boil and in fine Irish style (Michael was born in Derry) we moved from the shop to debate the detail into the night in the Del Aziz next door. You can see Fran's photos on this link. Bermondsey is so glamorous these days! You can make it even more so by coming to the next Evening with Rosie: on 26 October Jill McGivering of the BBC and I will be discussing her novel The Last Kestrel set in Helmand. I read it on holiday and loved it. Add Comment | View Comments Tuesday, 21st September 2010 Such a busy summer I hardly know where to start. Ah yes, with a last minute offer from wonderful David to go sailing round the Sporades with his crew in a catamaran. He thought he was skipper but that was actually 8 month old Alba, a talented young lady who took to her feet and cut her first tooth while we were away. I didn’t think the Med still had places which are completely deserted except for a few goats, but we found them. Glorious. Back for a weekend, then off to my grammar school Coleraine High School on the north coast of Northern Ireland. It always feels weird coming back to your old school – those school dances where the staff would go round the car park with a torch to see who was canoodling, the hideous uniform and, as Betjeman said, ‘the greatest dread of all, the dread of games’. But I loved this visit. I had a great half hour with their sixth form talking about books and writing. I adore that age group and their questions were magnificent: ‘What’s so wrong with a career in the law then?’ for example, and I could only bluster and say it wasn’t for me. John Mortimer managed to pull off being a success both at the bar and the keyboard. I plead in my defence that being a barrister is sometimes a bit like being an actor, you get rest periods to develop your other talents. And not everybody’s a genius like Mortimer. In the afternoon I was guest of honour at the High School’s speech day, a huge thrill which meant that I got to thank the school for what it did for me and say congratulations more often than ever in my life. I stood there mightily impressed by the achievements of those young women. My speech was about vocation and, in my case, running away from it. We often know very early, before we leave primary school, what motivates us and is going to complete our life, and I spent years not writing fiction. But if you have a vocation, you won’t be happy until you act on it, so I talked about getting to the right place via loads of wrong turnings. It might have been better for me to get to the right place sooner, maybe not, I don’t know. The trick is to appreciate the wrong turnings and see their value. Add Comment | View Comments Wednesday, 18th August 2010 The fourth annual Troubadour international poetry prize will be judged by Gwyneth Lewis & Maurice Riordan this year. Prizes: 1st £1000, 2nd £500, 3rd £250 & 20 prizes of £20 each plus a spring 2011 coffee-house poetry season ticket and a coffee-house poetry reading on Mon 29th Nov 2010 for all prize-winning poets. Submissions by Fri 15th Oct 2010. More about the marvellous judges, rules etc. on the Coffee House Poetry website and good luck! Add Comment | View Comments Monday, 2nd August 2010 An Evening with Rosie is a new monthly literary event at Woolfson & Tay, an independent book shop opening in Bermondsey in September, and I'm arranging for some fabulous authors to come. MICHAEL FOLEY (The Age of Absurdity: why modern life makes it hard to be happy) in Sept, JILL MCGIVERING (senior foreign news correspondent with the BBC) on 26 October, Whitbread prize winner and creator of Twelve Bar Blues and Musungu Jim PATRICK NEATE in November and MAUREEN DUFFY (poet and grande dame of literature) in December. In January '11 we'll have RUPERT SMITH (everything from gay erotica to literary fiction), MICHAEL ARDITTI in March and BLAKE MORRISON in April. In May JAMES HANNING and FRANCIS ELLIOTT will be chatting with me about their updated, no-holds-barred biog of David Cameron. And in June it's EDWARD WILSON who served in Vietnam as an officer in the 5th Special Forces, won the Bronze Star and Army Commendation Medal for Valor, and is now writing novels in Suffolk. Among them is A River in May, described as 'the best Vietnam novel ever' by Alan Sillitoe in the Independent on Sunday. Quality, one and all! As Flaubert said (in French presumably) 'since all the alternatives are absurd, let us choose the most noble'. If he'd been lucky enough to live in south east London now, wouldn't he have thought this was worth getting out of bed for? Come along and find out for yourself, it'll be great to see you. Please do book your ticket through the website before they're all gone. Add Comment | View Comments Thursday, 22nd July 2010 The Today programme this morning carried a very moving interview with John Dale, a soldier who has come back from Iraq with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Trauma is a word that’s chucked around all too easily these days and is even used interchangeably with drama, as when people talk about ‘the traumas’ in their lives. But trauma is damage and psychological trauma is no joke. It comes from deep shock, in John’s case the shock of discovering wounded women and children. Nothing in his training would have prepared him for that and that is what haunted his nightmares and triggered his PTSD. It’s a good thing that at long last PTSD is becoming something we all hear about, even if it’s hard to understand what it means. Combat stress, they call it too. In WW1 it was known as shell shock. What men don’t generally describe when they’re talking about it is the fear that comes with it. It’s as if the fear mechanism has broken down and even small things can become terrifying, however tenuously they're connected with the original shock. John Dale mentioned for example that doors banging in prison could take him back to the sound of bombs falling around him in the combat zone. That is one of the worst aspects of the disorder; someone who has prided him or herself on their courage through the worst of things becomes weak and small when they're safer. That’s why they need reassurance, as John Dale described, that their disorder is a normal reaction to the abnormal experiences they have had to endure. We have the Vietnam War veterans to thank for refining the diagnosis – being Americans, they knew their rights and weren’t afraid to ask for them. No stiff upper lip there. Quite right too and I’m glad that soldiers are getting proper help with PTSD now and proper recognition of the outstanding bravery that has led to it. But there’s another section of our society that lives quietly, even secretly, with PTSD. Sandra Horley, Chief Executive of Refuge, the world’s first refuge for women experiencing domestic abuse, says that she sees symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder in over half of the women who come to her charity. In their case the trauma happened in what should have been the safety of their own kitchens and beds, from someone claiming to love them. They deserve help and recognition too. Add Comment | View Comments Tuesday, 29th June 2010 It’s time I confessed to my secret vice. Some Monday evenings I go to the Troubadour in Earl’s Court to hear poetry readings run by Anne-Marie Fyfe. She’s from Antrim but that doesn’t deter her from bringing a spread of poets from all over the world of the highest quality. Last time for example they launched the latest Magma there, edited by the redoubtable Annie Freud with readings by Maureen Duffy, Jo Shapcott, Michael Foley and others with a stunning showcase by Dorothea Smartt. Next Monday (5 July) they’re having a party with a Heartbreak Hotel theme starting at 8. It’ll be full of surprises, the biggest being that among the invited readers will be me! I can hardly believe it! Come and hear me, go on. It'll be a right laugh. Add Comment | View Comments Sunday, 27th June 2010 Independent book shops are meat and drink to readers and writers like us and in September - great news! - a new one is opening in Bermondsey. Woolfson & Tay – Shivaun and Fran for short – have the perfect location between Sainsbury’s and Del’Aziz in Bermondsey Square and they already have a fantastically exciting line-up of events and plans. Once a month there’ll be An Evening With Rosie: I will interview visiting writers not just about their latest exciting new book but about how it came to be conceived and written and about their writing process. Jill McGivering’s going to be my first guest on 26 October.She’s the BBC correspondent whose first novel The Last Kestrel is set in Southern Afghanistan. You can book on the shop's website here. Add Comment | View Comments Sunday, 27th June 2010 From mid-January I’ll be leading a course called First Page: Getting Started in Writing Fiction at Bermondsey’s fantastic new book shop Woolfson & Tay. Everybody has a novel inside them, it’s true. If you’ve always fancied releasing yours but you’re not sure where to start, or you’re just feeling a bit lonely and unsure about it, this is the course you’ve been waiting for. We start on 15 January 2011 – perfect for those New Year Resolutions - from 4 to 6 pm for six sessions. We will explore getting started, keeping the flow and writing anywhere, any time. You will get to know your characters, learn about voice and viewpoint, and develop a sense of place in your writing. In the final session, you will have the chance to read aloud your finished piece of writing in a supportive environment. You won’t have to read if you don’t want to but I hope that by then you’ll be so proud of yourself, you’ll be bursting to do it. Applause is guaranteed. Places are limited so don’t leave it too late! You can book through the shop’s website here. Add Comment | View Comments Monday, 7th June 2010 If you’re tired of London, you're tired of life and it must be time for a trip down to Brighton. Keith Waterhouse said that Brighton looks like a town that’s helping the police with their inquiries, so that’s where I spent last Saturday on an excellent writing course run by New Writing South. The course was led by Jack Bradley. Jack’s an experienced dramatist (from Soho down to Brighton, he must have played them all) and I’m writing a novel, but that doesn’t really matter when you’re talking about character and structure and we all had a fantastic day of it. Add Comment | View Comments Saturday, 22nd May 2010 I've just been visiting friends in Beverley in the East Riding and I knew the food would be fantastic. Thanks, guys, the Alastair Little inspiration never dies and I’ve come back pounds heavier and happier. But I didn’t expect us to go out to eat so well too. Usually the whole point about undiscovered gems is not to tell people about them but I can’t resist it. This place is well worth a detour if you can, before they get their Michelin star and the prices go through the roof. Add Comment | View Comments Friday, 14th May 2010 You know you’ve finally grown up when you don’t know what time McDonalds closes any more, your car insurance goes down and sleeping on the sofa makes your back hurt. Or is when you’ve been asked to speak at Prize Day at your old school? I’m thrilled and proud to have been asked to come back to Coleraine High in September. All those years ago when I was running around there in a gym slip and black tights (liquorice legs, the boys used to call us), I never dreamt that I’d be asked back like this. God knows what I’ll say in my speech. I spoke to the 6th form of Townley Grammar a few years ago and Linda Hutchinson, their marvellous Head, asked me to give them a bit of advice. Just one bit. What on earth do you say to 16 or 17 year old girls these days? What they told us – keep your hand on your ha’penny – just wouldn’t wash. So I said this: there will be times when people infuriate you. You will want to write them a stinker of an email or text, so stinking that the thesaurus runs out of expletives and God’s ears turn blue. Write that email, I said, write it and make it a humdinger. Leave it overnight and in the morning make it hum even more. Invite your friends round for a glass of wine and read it to them and have a good long laugh. Then delete it. On no account must you ever send it. The world is incredibly small and those infuriating people will turn up again in your life. They might even be on the interview panel when you turn up for your perfect job. Be tough, but leave a soft footprint behind you. Add Comment | View Comments Thursday, 13th May 2010 It’s reported in today’s Mail that our soldiers coming back from war are drinking their way through their battle blues. 'Squaddies like a drink' is hardly news. What’s surprising though, hidden half way down the piece, is that levels of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder are holding steady since 2006 at 4%. This is good news. PTSD is no joke, especially to someone who has prided themselves on their courage time and again. It’s as if they’ve chucked every ghastly experience into a huge bag which they carry around without opening. Once they’re off the battlefield, just when they’re beginning to relax and think they’re safe, the bag explodes and those experiences burst out, demanding to be lived again. Those soldiers got through their day to day horrors was by pretending it wasn’t so bad. In fact they could ignore it all, laugh it off, pretend it was fine. If it wasn’t ignored like that, it would have been impossible to get on with their lives. But nature doesn’t like that. Nature needs us to know when we’re in danger and to feel it in our blood so deeply that it doesn’t happen to us again. That’s why those soldiers find themselves reliving those horrors as if they happened just yesterday. PTSD takes no account of the fact that the soldier is now genuinely safe, it just leaves him or her feeling incredibly weak and vulnerable. For these people - the bravest of the brave because they endured beyond the limit of their mental defences - PTSD must feel like the most unfair ordeal of all, and a very lonely one. Add Comment | View Comments Monday, 3rd May 2010 My past has been catching up with me. All thanks to the net and the weird magic of alumni sites. On Thursday a nice man from Herbert Smith interviewed me about how I managed to get deflected from being a power lawyer to writing fiction (I blamed my children). Friday saw me trawling Decathlon for a pink sports top, preferably with a natural fibre or two in it, so that I could row the next day for my old college. I’d always loathed sport of any kind at school but at university somehow everything was new to everybody (nobody I knew there had ever rowed before) and I had a go and loved it. A couple of months ago I allowed myself be volunteered for a veterans’ race and thought that a handful of us old crocks would paddle about a bit like extras from The Wind in the Willows before we hit the pub. Oh no. I was down to row in the Head of the Cam and the youngest other ‘veteran’ in the crew was young enough to be my daughter if I’d been a very bad girl at school. The oars are a different shape now and they’ve changed some of the terminology and I felt very old indeed but I’m happy to report that I’m still breathing, just. There were even moments when I enjoyed it: I never thought I’d row past the Plough again or have the pleasure of sitting at the start among all those brightly coloured young crews on such a glittering, sunlit day. You never know what life’s going to offer you next, do you? Here’s to the net. (Photo here if you have the stomach for it.) Add Comment | View Comments Friday, 23rd April 2010 What shall I apologise for today? Seal cub slaughter? Darlington Council? The very existence of the BNP? These things have nothing to do with me but why should that stop me? More apologies are flying around these days than jumbo jets but there’s something different about this latest one. No more ducking and dodging, the Roman Catholic bishops of England and Wales have united to ask forgiveness and have offered a “heartfelt” apology for the child abuse scandal that has engulfed their church. It’s not for me to say whether getting Catholics in Ireland and the UK to pray is going to help but a genuine apology, taking full responsibility with (as the Psalmist put it) a ‘humbled and contrite heart’ works wonders. A real apology has to come from the right person. So what are the bishops doing? Nobody has suggested they’ve laid a hand on anybody, have they? No. Whatever they say, their apology is not for the ‘personal sins of only a very few’. Only the actual perpetrators can do that, though there’s nobody more expert in self-deception than a sexual abuser. They bleat to their dying day that it didn't happen or was ‘consensual’, yet the truth is plain to see in the resulting damage. An apology is not just a moral and spiritual matter either. Anyone who apologises should accept the risk of being sued or prosecuted. (You listening, Gordon Brown?) Yes, the apologiser should carry the can. How colossally brave that person was who first spoke up. We’ve seen the pattern that follows: the speaker is labelled lying or mad or both. The victims will have been all too easy to vilify – they’ve been living with trauma for years and probably do have addictions and mood swings and flashes of anger – but the effects of the trauma do not mean that they are insane. What happened may be hard for people to believe but that does not stop it being true, and denial of the truth repeats their trauma over and over again. It prolongs and adds to it. And that is what the bishops’ apology is for. It's not just that the denials and cover ups were unseemly in spiritual leaders, it's that they actually made a hellish situation far worse. They’ve come a long way, those survivors, in giving an honest name to what has happened to them and facing their abusers about it. Now that they have this apology, along with assurances about future safety and legal liability, I hope they can at last feel truly safe and begin to recover. Add Comment | View Comments Thursday, 22nd April 2010 Many thanks to Alan Morrison and his team for a great ‘Death, scandal and writing tips’ evening at the Blackheath Village library on Tuesday. Imogen Robertson and I were talking about writing fiction, dovetailing our different experiences of it all. One of the questions that’s hovering with me was about blogging and what did we think about it. I’m all in favour, as you can see here, though I wouldn’t want it to take over my life. Some blogs are rubbish and some are excellent, as is the way with all things, and some of the excellent ones have become books. But they have not been published in their original form. The Secret Diary of a Call Girl is a good example. There’s a strong character with an unusual perspective on life which she expresses intelligently with bagfuls of pathos and humour but she couldn’t have made it into a book and television series without a coherent story line and structure. I’m reading Sarah Bakewell’s How to Live at the moment - ‘A life of Montaigne in one question and twenty attempts at an answer’ – and she suggests that the blog isn’t as recent an invention as all that. What else was Montaigne doing in his essays in the 16th century but bringing his private thoughts and experiences out for public perusal? So there you are. Nothing new under the sun. It’s all in the way you do it. Add Comment | View Comments Tuesday, 20th April 2010 I’m looking at a copy of my decree nisi. Some friends are commiserating as if I’m bereaved but I feel that divorce is like surgery, painful but healthy. No wreaths required, thank you. Add Comment | View Comments Sunday, 18th April 2010 As exciting weekends go, it’s been one of the best. I’m thrilled and exhausted after a three-day writing stint with Maggie Hamand and Shaun Levin of The Complete Creative Writing Course. I’m trying to recover from personal problems (the sort where it's difficult to see a problem as an opportunity) and Maggie, who’s my publisher at The Maia Press, suggested that her course might help. What a lovely lot of people! Wonderful, clever, sensitive writers – it’s been a pleasure to be among them. Maggie and Shaun are exceptionally talented at producing exercises to get the best out of us. I’ve been trying to settle the plot of my current work in progress –like trying to nail jelly to the wall – and the first day’s exercises took me down deep into my main character again. I found that although she’s an apparently composed City lawyer, what actually motivates her is fear. That made her sit up and talk to me again. (It’s that ‘controlled schizophrenia’ that we writers do, that’s so hard to explain to other people.) Shaun has some dream cards that combine weird, beautiful and sometimes frightening images. He’d share them out and ask us to write something, anything for ten minutes or so. Some of my most surprising writing came from letting one of those cards take me where it led. I’d forgotten how exciting writing into the unknown can be. Busy now typing it all up (yes, it was long hand first). Then I’ll slot it into that plot and hope to get flying on my second draft of The One. Add Comment | View Comments Sunday, 11th April 2010 If you'd like the chance to find out everything you ever wanted to know about fiction but were afraid to ask, here is a diary date: Imogen Robertson and I will be at the library in Blackheath village next Tuesday (20th) at 7pm. The event is free and it'll be the perfect way to escape from the election, I promise. (There, I got the words election and promise in the same sentence without lying!) Please come along and bring your friends. Add Comment | View Comments Thursday, 18th February 2010 This business of 'working women'. I know a lot of modest saints, I’m sure you do too, whose days are full of hospital visits, sensitive phone calls, urgent pick-ups of other people's children, unsung charity work and so on, all in addition to keeping their own homes and families ticking over. They're probably far too busy to read this. They are the invisible glue of our society, yet because they earn little or nothing, people say of them glibly that they ‘don’t work’. What's meant is that they don't earn. Abusing the term ‘work’ like this brings on the old debate about whether hands-on mothers/carers for older family members etc. have it tougher than people who are in employment or vice versa, and that's not my point. I'm all for women doing whatever they want and need. But we’re letting language define us by our earning capacity and nothing more. Identity theft, there’s another one. Someone can clone the chip in as many of my cards as they like and I will be cross as well as poorer, but my identity will be perfectly safe. Aren't we more than our money? Add Comment | View Comments Thursday, 18th February 2010 If you're in London looking for help and company with writing fiction, have a look at the complete writing courses run by my publisher, Maggie Hamand. I'd nearly run out of writing steam when I found her (recommended by my friend Dreda Mitchell, then a pupil). I'd spent about five years writing plays that got nowhere when WYSIWYG was accepted by Wolfhound Press and I remembered another pile of pages I had hidden away. I went along to Maggie's course at the Groucho Club to remind myself how novels were done and after more work (writing is about rewriting), it was published last summer as The Most Intimate Place. The beauty of Maggie's courses is not just that they are thorough and very well thought out but that everybody is great fun and, most important of all, nice. Add Comment | View Comments Wednesday, 3rd February 2010 I’d like to boast about my father for a change. Fifty years after he graduated from TCD in Classics, he completed a PhD at Queen’s, Belfast and became Dr Roy (RR) Johnston. It was classical music this time, and since then he has become a leading authority on the development of classical music in Northern Ireland and points south. He has written everything from programme notes for the Waterfront to sections of the new Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, and is currently top and tailing his own book for Ashgate Publishing. Not long ago he sent me this email: ‘This morning – from CUP – by white van there arrived the nine hefty volumes of the new Dictionary of Irish Biography. I have contributed a total of twelve entries. Much chuffed.’ Not nearly as chuffed, and proud of my 85 year old daddy, as I am. Add Comment | View Comments Tuesday, 2nd February 2010 Next Tuesday’s event at Blackheath Village Library has had to be postponed because of illness, sorry to say, and I hope whoever it is recovers well and cheerfully. We’ll be meeting instead on Tuesday 20 April at the library in Blackheath Grove, London SE3 from 7pm. Handy for the Thai restaurant and the best times south east London has to offer. See you there. Add Comment | View Comments Friday, 1st January 2010 You’ve gone into New Year’s Eve optimistically and come out misty optically. Everything hurts, your mouth’s dry and it’s all down to something you ate. What you need to pull you through is the prospect of intellectual stimulus, and I have the answer. On Tuesday 16 February (2010) from 7 to 8.30pm south east London writers Imogen Robertson and I will be at the Blackheath Village library (the one by the post office in Blackheath village, SE3) talking about writing fiction: how to dodge it, do it and see it through to publication and beyond. See you there! Meanwhile I wish you a gentle recovery from the festivities, and a very happy new decade. Add Comment | View Comments Thursday, 24th December 2009 Here are the best or the rest, with my apologies for seasonal delays (wrong kind of snow on this webpage). From MOLLIN V. W. MANDAZA in Harare, Zimbabwe: ‘My bedroom is my sanctuary of hope, solace and strength. My home within our home. A personal paradise for creativity, peace and reflection. Where everything seems right and even the world seems fair. The sacred and warm space to dream or cry.’ From SUSAN SHERWOOD: ‘A kaleidoscope of hues, textures, forms. Scent of moist soil, roses and newly cut grass. Sound of swishing grasses, rustling leaves and birdsong. My garden. Place of season and weather change. A continual fresh and novel place, conjuring up that pleasure which is a foretaste of Paradise.’ And from GABRIELLE BYRNE: ‘Intimate can conjure images of cotton wool hugs or softly spoken words whispered secretly throughout the night. For me however it’s walking along a stretch of lone, desolate coastline, tasting the faint tang of salt on my lips as the tide reaches its height, just me and the elements.’ Congratulations, everyone, and thank you very much for sharing your most intimate thoughts in such beautiful words. Right! It’s time for me to lower my head now, jut out my jaw, hunch those shoulders and face the least intimate place in the world, the shopping scrums in central London. It should be easy for me this year though – my kids are all students so they all want the same as me: a suitcase full of money and enough painkillers to see us through to January. Happy Christmas, everyone, and a very happy 2010. Add Comment | View Comments Monday, 21st December 2009 We have a winner! The entries for the Most Intimate Place creative writing competition have been impressive not just for the excellence of their writing but for coming from all over the world too. £50 worth of Maia Press books are on their way to MARIA JOSE MARINAS for this winning description of her Most Intimate Place: ‘The mountains of Soquel. Protected by pine trees a yoga studio rests uncertainly on the edge of a hill. I sit surrounded by strangers. Quietly I open and close the internal valve that controls my tears. A heat rises within that this envelope of mine cannot contain. I feel tender.’ I love the emotional tension in this piece and its perfect resolution in the final three words. Beautiful. Signed copies of The Most Intimate Place are on their way to five runners up. JEN BROPHY’S entry made me laugh: ‘Squinting through sleep, I searched my phone’s face. I kissed Sam. “Time I got up.” In the bathroom, I pondered my body. An intimate view certainly but not an uncommon one. Upon my return, Sam started, his guilt exposed. My appointments, texts, photos. Sam had pillaged my most intimate place.’ I enjoy how she plays with us over whether she’s more in love with Sam or her phone. MICHELLE PRITAL raised goosebumps with this entry shaped like a poem and sent from Israel: ‘When looking for that most intimate place When searching for that private niche in which to disappear When seeking out that most cherished of memories ... I dissolve into Vivaldi’s Concerto in C for two violins And find myself at 5 years old sitting on the bathroom floor Looking up As my dad shaves’ So much is in what Michelle has left unsaid. Very moving. From Scotland comes CHERYL O’BRIEN’s entry which rises in crescendo like a musical phrase: ‘It feeds dreams, nurtures ambition, is the wellspring of creativity. Curious, it thrives on knowledge, echoes passion and is a subtle prod guiding morality. Home to both logic and mysticism, it may even encompass immortality in spirit. I will only know for sure when I depart this place: my mind.’ BECKY SEFTON is another runner up with this: ‘Standing in the gravel sand, inhaling the salty air, I close my eyes and hear the waves smash against the shore, the surf breaking around my feet. Seaweed entwines itself around my toes. I feel the chilly breeze and the warm sun against my face.’ This took me straight back to the north Antrim coast where I grew up, lovely. SHANE O’HALLORAN sent us this exquisitely sensual brew from Dublin: ‘Dancing inside the hillbillies beard between the moonlight and shadow, the hair brushes my cheek as I move nearer the warm crescent. Lingering scent from the night before fills my nostrils as I move in for more. This is the palace of my dreams.’ Thanks to all of you for the excellence of your work. I wish you all happiness, fun and every success in your writing careers. Tomorrow I’ll post the best of the rest. Add Comment | View Comments Saturday, 5th December 2009 If you're in London, the Christmas party of the year will be at the Royal Opera Arcade this Wed 9 December, 4 – 7pm – please come. In July Pall Mall Stationers hosted a wonderful launch for me and this time the whole arcade is celebrating Christmas with red carpet style. There’ll be free champagne cocktails, mulled wine, mince pies, carols, Victorian entertainers and the chance to meet Kate Williams (the historian behind Young Victoria), Clare Mulley (prize-winning biographer of the founder of Save the Children) and me. You can pick up ideal Christmas gifts too in the shape of signed, discounted books too. Can't wait to see you. Add Comment | View Comments Monday, 16th November 2009 Can you describe YOUR Most Intimate Place in 50 words or less? The wonderful Blackheath library is running a competition to find the best description and the winner will receive £50 worth of books by my publisher Maia Press www.maiapress.com. The best submissions will appear here too. Don't forget, 50 words max please. Email your entries to noramckeogh.chalke@hotmail.co.uk and please don’t forget your name and contact details, otherwise we can’t send you your prize! Closing date: 1 December 2009. Add Comment | View Comments Sunday, 15th November 2009 While I was in Belfast in September, William Crawley asked me to drop into the BBC there for his excellent Sunday Sequence programme which offers intelligent comment on religious and philosophical issues not just from Northern Ireland but all around the world. William had read The Most Intimate Place, and better still he really understood it, so we had a fine old chat. It was broadcast while I was away in Portugal so I’ve no idea how I sounded. Probably just as well. Add Comment | View Comments Saturday, 14th November 2009 It was all going so well! Then came a review in the Church Times. Some poor woman from the Bible Reading Fellowship (who?) took exception to Helen, my delightful woman priest character, being described as having a ‘beautiful arse’. She'd decided from first sight of the encomia on the cover that she wasn’t going to like The Most Intimate Place and actually said that her readers should read Dan Brown instead! I’d hoped for something a bit more considered from the Church Times actually, especially as the theological research in my book was inspired when I sat in on a Church of England ordination course. (I had not been through the priest selection process but in those days they let interested lay people sit in on the lectures for a small fee.) The review is followed by an invitation to buy the book from the Church Times bookshop, so there you go. Good old Anglicanism keeping it buttered on both sides as usual. Add Comment | View Comments Monday, 2nd November 2009 This has been a fantastic summer for me and I want to thank everybody for it. I never expected my novel to please everybody – there are plenty of acclaimed books I don’t particularly like – but I’ve been overwhelmed by the positive response to The Most Intimate Place. People of all kinds and in the weirdest places! Thank you, everyone who emailed (through this site), wrote or even stopped me in the street to tell me how much you appreciated it. Thank you to all the atheists and humanists who wanted to discuss it for hours. (There were times when it was happening on a daily basis.) Thanks especially to people who said that my book felt real. Reality is what I revised the book so many times to achieve. Most moving were the people who told me that they read the book twice: first for a run through of the story itself and then a second time to absorb the language and nuances of the religious meditations. Some of those people are Christians but lots are not, and loads seem to be somewhere in between like me. Thank you all, I really appreciate it. Add Comment | View Comments Saturday, 17th October 2009 I’m in Portugal at the moment recovering from glorious book-flogging times in Belfast and Coleraine. Both branches of Waterstone’s were superb again, thanks to all the staff for their great hospitality, and this time the books were there for the selling and did very well. My time in Belfast was complete when I’d dropped into No Alibis to sign books and hear a bit of jazz, followed by a trawl round the Cathedral Quarter and ‘wee cacktail’ in the Merchant. Huge thanks to my auntie Anne for giving my liver a good bashing again. In Portstewart I had a go on the swings with my school friend Sharon (thanks for putting me up again, Sharon) and breakfast in Morelli’s with her and Patricia Davies, reunion of three school friends after God knows how long. Very many thanks to everybody who turned out and bought The Most Intimate Place and if you like it, tell your friends. Thanks too to Emma Nissim and her sister Rachael for their terrific event. We sold Sword Rampant t-shirts and bags (there might be one or two left, I’m not sure) and drank wine and went over to the Coach & Horses where yes, I read to the assembled patrons. They were rapt actually and afterwards people came up to tell me that it was Helen’s meditations that they enjoyed most. Now who would have thought that would ever happen in a pub? I’m not just dossing in the sun here actually. I’m working hard (that’s my story and I’m sticking to it) on the second draft of my next murder mystery. More about that when I’m back in November. Meanwhile I’ve had another small but perfectly formed review, in the States this time I’m thrilled to bits! Add Comment | View Comments Saturday, 5th September 2009 I've been persuaded of the beauties of Word Press so PLEASE CLICK HERE for updates from now on. Same website style, same old me. Add Comment | View Comments Saturday, 29th August 2009 Climate Camp Blackheath seems to have awakened my inner lawyer. I wish it hadn’t but anyway here’s this. The point of a common is that everybody can walk wherever they like on it with no fences in the way. Sorry, guys. I can imagine your hearty rendition across the Heath of Sue me, Do me from Guys n Dolls but we could be talking both. That hole in the ground under your Heath Robinson double-decker bath system (in the London zone) for sifting washing up water bothers me too. There’s an ancient right of turbery which is the right to cut turf from land but it rarely applies to common land and it’s unlikely you could say that’s what you’re doing anyway. I know your intentions are good but it’s not in anybody’s interests if people dig up the Heath wherever they like. But how’s anybody going to enforce these laws, seeing as how you’re an anarcho-syndicalist commune with no leaders and no structure? Well, those mighty prophets Monty Python have been in my head this week and yet again they have it spot on in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, at 2.58... Add Comment | View Comments Saturday, 29th August 2009 I’m coming back to Belfast Waterstone’s on Friday 18 September at 2pm and the next day, Saturday 19 Sept, to Coleraine Waterstone’s from 2.30pm. As before, there’ll be champagne, readings from The Most Intimate Place and, with any luck, plenty of books. It'll be the best of crack and everybody’s welcome, it’ll be great to see you. I’ve signed copies in Gower Street Waterstone’s this week too, for anybody in London who’d like one. And Greenwich Waterstone’s has restocked several times, they’re going like this, get them while they’re hot. Add Comment | View Comments Saturday, 29th August 2009 Blackheath library in the Old Dover Road is hosting a CREATIVE WRITING COMPETITION based around my novel - aren't they wonderful? Can you describe YOUR Most Intimate Place in 50 words or less? The winner will receive £50 worth of books by my publisher The Maia Press and the best submissions will appear here on this site. 50 words maximum. Email your entries please to richardforeman.chalke@hotmail.co.uk Don’t forget your name and contact details, otherwise we can’t send you your prize! I'm not sure what the closing date is yet but I'll check for you. From my biog page here, you can see that I've been a freelance journalist from time to time and have written for BBC radio 3. My children’s novel What You See Is What You Get is also set in Blackheath where I live. If you would ever like me to give a talk to your Book Group or Creative Writing Group please contact richardforeman.chalke@hotmail.co.uk or me on rosemaryfurber@googlemail.com and I'll be happy to come along. Thank you and the very best of luck in the competition! Add Comment | View Comments Friday, 28th August 2009 I’ve just been talking to Meg Dinkeldein about Climate Camp coming to Blackheath. She’s a local artist, nurse and mother of four who was so horrified by the amount of litter under foot when she started running marathons that she set up a litter-picking campaign. She’s co-operated with both local councils for years about how the Heath should be cared for, and says that there are twelve official events on Blackheath each year, so it’s pretty busy already. What if this camp doesn’t remove itself next week? What if they decide, or some of them decide, it would be fun to do this again, often? Is their swoop fair on people (mostly charities) who apply legitimately year on year to use the Heath and are turned down? And what’s it all costing? Meg is passionate about a lot of things and top of her list at the moment is the Blackheath Society’s graffiti-busting group. Graffiti is a sign of anarchy for her. She’s an activist herself, a powerful force for change but always in legitimate ways, and I admire her. I’ve been thinking about this phrase ‘direct action’ in the context of the camp and if illegal action is what they mean, they should say so. I trained as a solicitor and found myself drawn to the legal tent at the climate camp yesterday where I met Andrew. He’s a nice guy with tidy, short hair, and I took him to be a lawyer. No, he’s an engineer (proper job, yes) whose legal experience consisted of having faced down the police in ‘direct action’ for climate change before. The legal tent is where they train legal observers to be witnesses for anyone in confrontation with the police. Good work, it has to be done, and Bindmans are on hand to give free legal help throughout the week. But it was the beginning of my realisation that the gentle, flowers in their hair atmosphere of the camp covers something altogether darker. Nobody bothered to tell me, a mere local, that they were planning illegal activities throughout the week. Someone did disclose (and it’s in their literature) that they’re going to be planning another swoop with ‘direct action’ on a coal-powered power station in October. But they claimed that the educational side of the camp was paramount. I wonder if it is. If this week’s camp goes peacefully, will they really have succeeded in their aims? There’s plenty of precedent for illegal action being the only way to get things done from the Suffragettes to the IRA but it makes me deeply uncomfortable. Maybe this government’s most poisonous legacy, besides the Iraq war and dragging the whole political game into disrepute, is that our right to peaceful protest has been so badly eroded that a whole new generation is seeing anarchy as the only answer. The climate camp is cunningly run by what they describe as consensus. There is a system of meetings where people wave hands to agree or disagree (it sounds like puppet school without their Sooty and Sweep gloves on) and decisions are described as entirely mutual. A lot of the kids like this, they’re persuaded that it involves them more in decisions than voting for something where a section of the group feels defeated. Very clever. It’s also the key to the secrecy of what’s going on, because there’s no leader and no official plan other than the schedule of workshops. But wherever you get people being organised, there’s usually an inner circle who actually run everything whatever the system is supposed to be, and the people with the most experience on this campsite are bound to be the ones who’ve been arrested most often for ‘direct action’. Are the young idealists aware of this? They will be when they need a legal observer at their elbow. Add Comment | View Comments Thursday, 27th August 2009 I might have spent today being a human shield. It’s hard to be sure. I also want to claim my medal for using the Blackheath Climate Camp loo in a high wind. According to facebook, locals are invited into the climate camp to see what’s going on, so I did. I’ve lived in Blackheath (on the cheaper Westcombe Park side, the ‘servants’ quarters’) for twenty five years and here’s world politics on our doorstep, it’s too good to miss. The metal fencing was daunting at first, I have to say. The campers have put it there themselves and it’s the first camp where it’s happened. Good move, as anybody could roam in among them with the best of intentions, or the worst. It is London after all. The only entrance (it’s hard to miss, on the Lewisham side) has a serpentine queuing layout, maybe to stop the entrance being charged by unwanted marauders, and lots of smiling young people sitting on haybales welcome you. My kids are all students, I’m comfortable with that age group and I love the ideological light in their eyes. If you don’t think you can change the world at that age, when do you? Say you’re local and they’re lovely, you’re their human shield after all. You’re directed firmly to a welcome tent, where they keep mentioning the voluntary contribution thing, and I keep seeing nose rings and tattoos and ‘trustifarians’, those expensive white kids in dreads. It’s not their fault they’re expensive - I don’t know anybody who forced their unwilling parents for the right to go to posh school - but they’re here at climate camp and good for them. On the way in I’d noticed four or five unmarked white vans and a cherry picker in Hollyhedge House, what’s that about? Hollyhedge House is the army cadet training centre – my kids’ school moved there briefly a few years ago when their playground collapsed – and it didn’t used to be a home for White Van Man. Police, I was told. Surely there’s no need, I said, they’re just down the hill in Lewisham, where the Army and Navy used to be. In fact, this spot where they’re camping now is where you often see the mounted police slot in a bit of dressage and ease the horses’ feet. (It's also where I put a big scene in The Most Intimate Place.) Did the campers know they’d pitched their tents almost next door to one of the biggest mounted police centres in London? No. With a handful of rough-textured literature, I wandered off and soon found some neighbours of mine walking their dog and doing a recce; their 17 year old wants to come and camp. They were nodding and smiling, the atmosphere is happy and calm, they couldn’t see a problem at all. I kept bumping into friends and neighbours in fact. Who needs Jade Boulangerie this week, the social life of Blackheath has transferred up the hill. Jade’s got no loo for a start, and I can report that the sawdust loos of the camp do not smell, mostly because they’re thoroughly ventilated by huge gaps in the woodwork. They’re private enough, don’t get me wrong, but as I tried to sprinkle sawdust as instructed, a gust of wind caught it and I wound up shaking sawdust out of my knickers all day. Just for the record, I couldn’t find a single local person who’s against the camp being here on our Heath. It’s everybody’s Heath and it has a history of being the focal point for social change. The campers are making much of Wat Tyler’s Peasants’ Revolt in 1381, omitting to mention that Tyler was stabbed by the Lord Mayor (William Walworth) for his pains and his colleague Jack Straw was beheaded. It was also the focal point for the Chartists and the Cornish Rebellion, both of which ended in slaughter, and more recently it was where the Poll Tax rioters gathered before marching to Trafalgar Square to take on Thatcher. We’re taken over by the London Marathon every year, not to mention the bank holiday fair and all its mess. So, as long as the campers clear up nicely after themselves, as they’ve promised to do, we welcome them, they’re thoroughly in tune with our tradition. As I was leaving, I noticed police cars making a detour down Eliot Place instead of what would be their usual route straight up Hare and Billet Road. The policing did indeed seem to be subtle, so far. I went over to have a look at the white vans in Hollyhedge house and found two pleasant but watchful members of the Met coming to greet me. After an affable chat about how it was another day at the office for them really, in between West Ham’s victory and the Notting Hill carnival, I asked if the police knew that locals were being invited in to learn about climate change for themselves. The answer was no. They do now. Add Comment | View Comments Sunday, 23rd August 2009 The most dangerous thing about Belfast has always been the hospitality and I knew it would take me a day or two to recover from my trip over there. I’ve been fast asleep until noon today - the price of talking (and listening) pretty much non-stop while I was away. Huge thanks to my Auntie Anne for her limitless hospitality and hustling talents. Thank you to everybody who turned up to buy my book; some of you I hadn’t seen for decades and you haven’t changed one bit. Thanks to the Waterstone’s staff in Belfast and Coleraine for helping as much as they possibly could in tricky circumstances. We didn’t have enough books! Apologies to everybody who turned up and tried to buy and couldn’t. It’s not the fault of the staff: across the UK a new Waterstone’s delivery system is settling in. It’s called The Hub (I keep wanting to call it The Hoff) and is supposed to reduce the number of lorries and their diesel fumes. The trouble is that delivery can now be as much as two weeks, especially if there’s a stretch of sea between the shop and the pixies in Slough or wherever it is that they organise these things. So we’re fixing another date – the weekend of 19/20 September is pencilled in – and I’ll keep you posted. Thanks too to my school friend Sharon for putting me up so beautifully. She’s introduced me not only to her excellent home-made watermelon daiquiris but to the refurbished Morelli’s on Portstewart prom. This ice cream cafe was the centre of our erotic lives when we were teenagers and was resolutely unchanged throughout the troubles; now that old man Morelli has died at, ahem, 99, it’s transformed into an ice cream palace. A Copacabana is still larding my hips. Thanks too to Alison for reminding me that the sun can actually shine on Portstewart strand, and to everybody for your huge enthusiasm for The Most Intimate Place. I suspected the sexy bits might be popular but I’d no idea you’d have such an appetite for blasphemy over there! Of course you’re an educated lot where religion’s concerned, combined with an open-mindedness that seems to really relish this book. I tend to skate over the religious aspects of the book here in London in case people are put off – though people who haven’t the slightest interest in religion still seem to love the novel - but I’ll never forget the silence that fell over Belfast Waterstone’s during my reading of the religious meditation on pages 40/41... Add Comment | View Comments Saturday, 15th August 2009 I’ve got a review! In the Guardian too, by someone I’ve never even met. I’m in danger of knowing it by heart by lunchtime. Laura Wilson’s even mentioned Sword Rampant's website and has likened them to Spinal Tap. No higher praise. Oh what a beautiful morning! Add Comment | View Comments Wednesday, 5th August 2009 On Saturday 15 August at about 2.30pm I’m going to be a guest on Candy Devine’s show on Downtown radio, talking about The Most Intimate Place. My novel is set in south London and Cambridge but it probably first germinated on Portstewart prom years ago when I was in a bottle-green gym slip singing from a CSSM hymn sheet. There are copies in Waterstone’s in Belfast and Coleraine and I’m planning to come over the following week and sign them while I’m there. Please drop me an email through this site if you’d like me to meet you in one of the shops and dedicate a copy specially to you. Add Comment | View Comments Monday, 3rd August 2009 I’m in love with Wales. Just back from Aber musicfest in Aberystwyth where I did the Big Band course, for the fun of it. It’s been a week of magnificent concerts – my favourite was probably Tom Poster’s Rachmaninov 2 – and some pretty weird experiences, not least being told about three hours before our main Big Band concert that I was going to do some improvising. In public. I was given a quick rundown of the blues scale and sent out there. Apologies to anybody within listening distance of my practice but I was having the time of my life. Add Comment | View Comments Sunday, 2nd August 2009 If music be the food of love, then reading from your own book to a crowd of strangers in Hackney must be the pick of the puddings. Our Hackney event, combining jazz and The Most Intimate Place, was Richard Turner’s idea. He’s just turned 25, has played jazz trumpet at Ronnie Scott’s several times already and tours regularly with his own band Round Trip who improvise around his compositions. As soon as Richard clapped eyes on the basement at Hackney’s new book shop Pages, he saw it as the perfect place for a bit of jazz/ literature fusion. It worked so well that he’s named one of the most beautiful of their pieces The Most Intimate Place! Very many thanks to everybody who came (not least the man who recognised my name from some journalism I did years ago), to Richard and Round Trip, and above all to Eleanor who owns Pages, for her elegant work as our hostess. Add Comment | View Comments Wednesday, 22nd July 2009 Who reads books these days? Our great cultural icon Arnie Schwarzenegger has ordained that all that a properly educated little Californian needs is a laptop. I love to imagine people from other countries smuggling real books into Los Angeles for the poor deprived kids there, so that they can have the pleasure of a proper bedtime read or get to keep their favourite novel handy for rereading on the bus. In case we forget what a wonderfully simple device a book is, writers often go around now, usually under cover of darkness, bringing out these almost illicit devices from our inside pockets and reading aloud. Last Monday evening, in a suitably dark cellar in Soho, I went to the Book Club Boutique to hear poetry posing as stand-up, stand-up cross-dressed as poetry, and Patrick Neate reading from his excellent novel, Jerusalem. A great night. Add Comment | View Comments Wednesday, 22nd July 2009 Nobody in Cambridge needs to be told what books are for, of course, and last night I was in Heffers there for the most extraordinary book event I’ve ever been at. No lines of wonky chairs. No readings! Just loads of people filling every level and space in the shop. They had one thing in common (apart from the usual literary interest in wine): they were all crime writers or crime readers, or both. It was so friendly (maybe I’ve been in London too long) that I even bought a novel in French, just because the author and his wife were so nice. I’m thrilled to have seen piles of The Most Intimate Place diminish quite nicely from a table on the ground floor there. The staff can always reorder if they’ve sold out by the time you get there ... Add Comment | View Comments Wednesday, 22nd July 2009 It’s my turn to part the covers and do a bit of public reading again myself, at Pages of Hackney this Friday at 7pm. Details of this FREE event are on the shop’s website here. I’ll be finding an especially juicy bit of The Most Intimate Place for East London to hear, and then at about 8pm a highly acclaimed band of young jazz musicians called Round Trip will take over. We’d hoped for sunshine so that the band could play outside, but the book shop has a fantastic performance room in the basement if we need it. I’m told that the whole thing is going to be impossibly ‘groovy’. It will be if you’re there. Add Comment | View Comments Thursday, 16th July 2009 Last night at the London Literature Festival, Susie Orbach and Andrew O’Hagan were quizzing each other earnestly about the nexus of modern fiction and psychotherapy when Will Self came up with a succinct answer, in Self himself. He’s had a close relationship with talking cures apparently. His mother was in psychoanalysis while she was pregnant with him; in fact it was her shrink who persuaded her not to have an abortion. Will didn’t disclose whether he was glad of that decision or not, and mentioned gently that the therapy process seems to benefit the therapist more than the subject, who is eased from neurotic misery into commonplace unhappiness. How does Self Know? He’s spent years in analysis himself but announced, to cheers, that he’s been ‘therapy free’ for ten years now. Congrats to the London Lit Fest for a fantastic couple of weeks. It closes tonight and I only had time to catch half a dozen of the events but they were all superb. Add Comment | View Comments Friday, 10th July 2009 Just off to sign books in Greenwich Waterstone's. What should I sign them this time? Katie Price? Add Comment | View Comments Tuesday, 7th July 2009 'It's perfectly monstrous the way people go about saying things against one, behind one's back, that are absolutely and entirely true.' Thank you, Oscar. And if I hadn't been footering my life away on the net yesterday, I might not have found the website for Sword Rampant. I love the Sword! They're my favourite heavy metal band, which is why they feature pretty heavily (how else is a metal band going to feature?) in The Most Intimate Place. But the band has found out. Will they mash my Vespa in rage or give me VIP backstage access for life? You can read their verdict here . Add Comment | View Comments Tuesday, 7th July 2009 There’s something I must clear up: we have a wide spectrum of theological beliefs in my family, including none at all, and none of them knew what I was writing in The Most Intimate Place until copies arrived from the printer a couple of weeks ago. I work alone, it’s how I like it, so please don’t expect them to try and defend what I’ve said. The responsibility is all mine. If you'd like me to explain myself, please help yourself on the contact page. Add Comment | View Comments Monday, 6th July 2009 I've just had the most spectacular week of my life and hoped to be able to blog long and hard about it all, but my website's been down. Now we're rolling again, so huge thanks to everybody who came to my launches last week and to everybody who's bought The Most Intimate Place, wherever you are. Happy reading. If you think you know me, prepare to be surprised. Enormous thanks too to everybody who helped out this week: Richard who runs the Blackheath library in Old Dover Road, SE3 and was our host on Tuesday, Alice WB who did the most spectacular job of the food and wine that night though she didn't know she was helping until the day before, and Lizzie who helped her and also took great photographs. Thanks to my wonderful, loyal trumpeters, Mat Down and Alex Cromwell on Tuesday, and Alex again with Bill Cooper (of Barmy Army fame) on Thursday. I always have a fanfare at my launches - why not? - and usually I think I plan to play along and then faff about being too het up on the night. This time Mat included a nice easy line for me and gently insisted that I was going to play too. I'm still glowing with the privilege of playing alongside these great men. On Thursday, thanks again to Holly and Caroline for their fantastic hospitality at their beautiful shop Pall Mall Stationers where the bellinis and bagels slipped down and treat and the weather was less punishingly hot. The following day I dropped into Waterstone's in Notting Hill to see a friend and found myself (so hungover I could hardly bite my own finger) signing a load of copies there too. The perfect end to a blissful week. Get them while they're hot! Add Comment | View Comments Tuesday, 2nd June 2009 Very soon there'll be signed copies at the Bookshop on the Heath in Blackheath, south east London. What a fantastic shop it is! If you let Richard or me know what you'd like, I could sign a book specially for you. You'd need to pick it up from the shop but it's such a treasure trove, it's a treat to visit. Add Comment | View Comments Tuesday, 2nd June 2009 And in emma nissim's beautiful shop in Greenwich market too, close to Cutty Sark station on the DLR and Greenwich Pier (I love the Thames Clipper service). Greenwich railway station's a bit of a hike but there are pubs on the way. Add Comment | View Comments Tuesday, 19th May 2009 I’m up to my eyes in page proofs for The Most Intimate Place and it’s a delicious experience. I’m amazed how much sex there is in it actually. My neighbours keep asking whether it’s porn or not, as I have a poster of the cover in the window. Well, the answer is no, it’s a bit more lifelike than that - David Lodge said that fiction is a lot about sex and not much about children, while in real life it's the other way around - but there are some sexy people in there! I love working with Maia Press, by the way. The beauty of a small publisher is that the process is simplified and clear. I always feel that I’m in safe hands. Add Comment | View Comments Thursday, 30th April 2009 Burlesque, hmm. Well, we’d had the debate at home about whether a hundred years of feminism should really culminate in London’s twenty-somethings showing their knickers all over the place, and I’d been told off for condemning anything any other woman does. Feminism’s about choice, I was told, even when a woman chooses to behave like a complete tit. Right. Well, I’m all for the other guy’s right to swing his fist as long as it doesn’t coincide with my face but I’m even more with Caitlin Moran’s piece recently in the Times. She dared to say that lapdancing is tacky, all cheap moves and unfeasible bodies, and could the dancers please just get off the podium and stop letting all us women down? Burlesque, however, is different. I went to support a friend reading from his book and there were some ‘burlesque’ dancers. Yes, I was embarrassed but mostly by how amateur their acts were. I know I’m not their core audience but, oh for somebody half as raunchy as Mae West or Susan Sarandon. Or Sarah Palin. It was a bit like watching your cousin show her knickers in church. But I have to say this: they were women with real bodies. Not a cosmetic enhancement in sight - is there some sort of liberation in that? Add Comment | View Comments Thursday, 30th April 2009 I’ve just read a graphic novel for the first time and I'm a convert. My daughter had been telling me for ages that there is good stuff to be found in the form, and she's a shrewd judge of literature, but I don’t know, I’m a words person and I still expected Son of Batman or some barely fictionalised computer game. Thank you, Emily, of Greenwich Waterstone’s for recommending Fun Home by Alison Bechdel. It’s a study of a closeted gay father and the impact on the whole family, particularly Alison herself who turns out to be an uncloseted lesbian. Very moving writing – it drew me into an unfamiliar world as brilliantly as anything I’ve ever read – and it’s beautifully enhanced by her black and white drawings. I can't link it for you as it doesn't seem to be on Waterstone's or amazon's websites yet, but Emily knows how to get you one. Add Comment | View Comments Monday, 27th April 2009 It’s finally finished and so am I. The Most Intimate Place has had its last dot and comma from me and should be heading off the printers soon. Even though my publisher Maia Press took time out to merge with Arcadia Books, everything’s still on schedule for publication of my book in July. Et in Arcadia I go - hurray! Add Comment | View Comments Monday, 20th April 2009 When Zippo, Audi, Dubonnet and Daf Trucks all merge, they'll be known as Zip Audi Doo Da - which is how I feel about the merger, announced today, of my publisher Maia Press with Arcadia Books. Congrats all round. Looks like a marriage of true minds and a merger made in heaven. Add Comment | View Comments Friday, 3rd April 2009 At this crucial time in our country’s political history, some writers gathered in a small, upper room near Paddington last night and came to an important decision: we reckon that Ulrika’s facelift makes her look like a spacehopper and it’s time somebody grabbed her ears and bounced her all the way down Praed Street. Jacqui Smith’s wasting her time trying to prove that female politicians are every bit as ghastly as the men – we’re not fooled, it’s a career move and she’ll be running the country with a peerage as soon as Lord Mandelson gives her the chance. Meanwhile Ms Smith should use her power as Home Secretary to impose the spacehopper treatment on every one of our darling ‘celebrities’, to bounce some sense into them. Add Comment | View Comments Thursday, 2nd April 2009 If you ever get the chance to see Last American Freak Show, grab it. Chances aren’t likely to come up all that often – the film’s already been dismissed by Bafta as too dangerous for general consumption. Director Richard Butchins took his camera (no crew, just him) on a 2500 mile ‘freak show’ tour of the American West and the result is funny, heartbreaking and in many places very sweet. The most laughs probably come from Lo-rent, the driver of their decrepit bus who sold his brains for weed years ago but the direction is far too subtle to bang any moral in your face. Least of all about bossy Sam, the able-bodied organiser. Back home in her garden at the end of the tour, we see her children lean into her and try to hug her while she keeps both hands deep in her pockets. Hmm ... Add Comment | View Comments Friday, 27th March 2009 My thriller The Most Intimate Place has a launch date! There'll be trumpets, fine wine, great company and the chance (fingers crossed) to see my book in print at last on Tuesday 30 June. A preview reader has said this on the Waterstone's website: ''Dazzling and wonderfully blasphemous and electric, a contemporary literary work that shines with touching clarity, not to mention achingly subtle violence, tender realism and tremendous and earthy dialogue.' Surely he meant the latest by the immortal Katie Price but no, he said he definitely meant my book. It’s about ten years since I started working on this novel, off and on, and I can’t wait to hold it in my hand. Email me on rosiefurber@googlemail.com if you’d like to know more. Add Comment | View Comments Tuesday, 17th March 2009 There’s alcohol-free beer, caffeine-free coffee, celebrities nobody’s heard of and a free society where our every move is recorded on camera. Last night was a writer’s nightmare: a book launch with no books. Not quite no books, to be fair, there were four. Four copies. And no publisher there to explain himself. It wasn’t my launch but that didn’t make it any happier and yes, we used a little real, alcohol-full wine to dull the pain. So there you have it: even if you're well known, it can still be a rocky old road being a writer. Add Comment | View Comments Tuesday, 17th March 2009 I think of myself as a mild, tolerant sort of person (even if my kids reckon I'm exactly like this) but I want the death penalty brought back now, for hackers. They've stolen into my hotmail account, moseyed around shifting things, they've spammed my contacts promising 'surprising happiness' with their 'electornic products' and, most criminal of all, have deleted half my contacts list. So please ignore the address on the contacts page here, I'm at rosiefurber@googlemail.com now. Add Comment | View Comments Friday, 6th March 2009 World Book Day might have escaped you yesterday unless you have children at school and have been dressing them up as their favourite fictional character. Or you might be a teacher and got to dress up to the nines yourself, all in the interests of literature. I’ve just been talking to 10 to 13 year olds at three schools in north London. The schools couldn’t have been more different, and each one was fantastic. I told them about a ghost experience I had when my youngest was a baby, and how I used my fictional characters in WYSIWYG to explore that sense of terror and what it meant. Most ghost stories just set out to make your hair stand on end but I used WYSIWYG to go further and let my characters debate whether everything in life really can be scientifically explained. Usually when I do these talks, the school children and I swap some ghostly tales, get the goosepimples rippling over just about everybody and then we talk about whether our experiences really are supernatural. Usually we wind up thinking that we haven’t come all that far since Hamlet said about 400 years ago that there are more things in heaven and earth than are explained by, well, anybody really. Or maybe we have. It's fun either way. We humans love being frightened when we’re safe really. Add Comment | View Comments Saturday, 28th February 2009 I love the net! Facebook has come in for a pasting this week for rotting our brains and social lives, but I’ve just had an email through this site from a cousin I haven’t seen for decades. It’s triggered delicious memories of making mud pies with her and her brothers, and how her father taught me how to pull baby carrots out of the soil, shake them and eat them right there on our hunkers in the garden with the sun on our backs. Not much sun of course, because it was in the wilds of Fermanagh. Or it might have been Dundrum, that’s the way it is with memories, I can’t be sure. But her short email has taken me back to a moment that I can see from an adult’s point of view now: my uncle was a highly decorated policeman in what the Chinese call ‘interesting times’ and there he was on a warm day enjoying children, and the soil in his hands. I’m thrilled to hear from you, Kathy. Lots of love! (PS: 12.03.09 So sad to see my homeland become 'interesting' again. We can match the Chinese in understatement: we talked about 'the troubles' though it meant that just about every family in that tiny province knew bereavement up close and personal. But so many things have changed over the past ten years. I watched an Irish rugby match on television the other day - they were in Dublin - and noticed two guys on the terraces wearing black berets. I couldn't help wondering, when did that become OK? But the most important thing that's changed must be that the gunmen's hinterland has shrunk to the size of a couple of secondhand black balavclavas. Or so they tell us. Tragic times. I'm sorry for all the families involved.) Add Comment | View Comments Sunday, 25th January 2009 It’s been a great week in Washington DC and things have been pretty exciting here for me too. The Most Intimate Place has a publication date – 16 July 2009 – and an amazon page. (Any suggestions for that page btw beyond the usual sample chapter and summary?) The cover’s all ready except for my author photograph, so I went to the seaside yesterday to see Suzanne Grala. She was wonderful, she must have taken dozens of photographs of me lying around on a suave sofa as if I was waiting for somebody to peel me a grape. She’d powder my nose a bit, or gently move my hand or wrist, while I’d pretend to be a cross between Kate Winslet and Goldie - no, no, I mean Iris Murdoch really. Such a weird and wonderful experience. I’ve been getting feedback from my technical readers too and I can't thank them enough for their kindness and the pains they've taken. Like Noel Coward, I adore criticism as long as it’s undiluted praise and there has actually been quite a lot of that. No, it’s true! Even from people who don’t know me! So, about ten years after I started the first draft of The Most Intimate Place, I'm beginning to feel as if publication might actually happen... Add Comment | View Comments Wednesday, 21st January 2009 It’s great to see a black Irishman in the White House, so it is - congratulations to you and yours, Mr O’B. The world rocked on its axis yesterday and we’re all smiling about it. All of us. I don’t know a single person who’s unhappy to see a clever person who can handle his own fine words promising that America will think about others for a change. I loved to see the new President fluff his lines as he was sworn in, and that little lean towards his wife for support. That was no failing, that was plain human nerves, and who wouldn’t be nervous with the net humming with brainless threats to his life. I was so impressed by his black bodyguard too, the man walking beside the six-ton car, the elegance of him in his suit and overcoat as he walked his black President down Pennsylvania Avenue. From my desk here I could see the dome of the Greenwich O2 gleaming with celebrations last night, stuffed with successful, happy people who happen to have brown skins. I’d still rather be a poor person here in the UK than over there of course, and maybe this new administration will look to us for lessons in liberalism. I hope they do, but I’d be surprised. It wasn’t liberalism that built the British Empire after all. One of America’s greatest exports is Hollywood and its happy endings, which we love because life isn’t so straightforward. But with this new First Family, we have a bright warm shiny gold-star happy beginning. I wish them all the very best. Add Comment | View Comments Friday, 16th January 2009 Went to see Australia, which is corn as high as a kangaroo’s eye, and I spent most of the time wincing at the sight of Nicole K’s new lips. Every time we got a great big close-up of a romantic kiss, I was crossing my legs at her pain. Did the guy get instructions on how to kiss her: no Rhett Butler action please, it’s nothing but hovering and butterfly kisses for Miss Kidman in case she bursts? Don’t tell me it didn’t hurt. She looked as if she’d taken a smash in the teeth from this guy. Am I the only one nauseated by this? Nicole's lips are just one small example of the mutilation we see all over the place now, for our entertainment. Why do we put up with it? And how can we say a word against FGM as long as we do? Add Comment | View Comments Wednesday, 14th January 2009 I’ve discovered three things over the hols. I can blow up a balloon five feet long in just two or three breaths, so all that trumpet practice has not been in vain. I can still knock out a chocolate birthday cake covered in jelly tots on New Year's Day. (My youngest was due on Christmas Day and twenty years on he's still pretty laid back about deadlines.) And what was the third thing? Oh yes, I lose my brains completely for about a fortnight after a general anaesthetic. But it was Christmas and it didn’t matter a bit. Like George Bush I took to reading a couple of books a week, often without moving my lips, and I managed to colour in some of them too. The Western world has a few worries at the moment and close to top of the list is what George is going to do with himself now. I mean, he could be dangerous out on his own. The best we can hope for is that he's going to keep pitching up at the office to distract people like David Brent. Public speaking, somebody said. Yeah, play to your strengths, George. Add Comment | View Comments Monday, 12th January 2009 I'm back to the grindstone and today, as usual, I started by taking a few moments to scribble about why I love writing. This is what came out: I love the way it puts the broken pieces of me back together. There are many things that I can do with my energies, and have done, but writing is the one (making music occasionally too) that puts the brokenness together, moves blockages and inhibitions out of the way and moves me forward. It manages somehow, without anyone else being involved, to make me feel loved and worthwhile. Extraordinary. I’d no idea I was going to write that when I started at the top of the page and there’s no guarantee of course that doing what you think you were born to do makes it any good, but it does make it fun. Here’s to fun and lots of it. Add Comment | View Comments Tuesday, 23rd December 2008 Another day, another party or two and last night I was at the Big Green Bookshop in Wood Green raising a glass to the total lack of recession in that terrific little shop. I bought a bagful of books of course, including Tim Defender of the Earth and a weird cult thing called A Year in the Life of The Man Who Fell Asleep, which had me laughing out loud in the shop. Simon recommended The Suicide Shop – brilliantly dark - and I was laughing out loud again reading that on the tube on the way home. I do like the word lol, you know. Guffaw, chuckle, crack up, giggle, snicker, snort, whoop, titter, cackle, simper … This is beginning to sound like a hen party trapped in a sex shop and all those words have their uses, but none of them quite covers a simple, happy explosion of laughter like lol. So I hope your 2009 sparkles with love and your Christmas (or whatever you're celebrating) is a right lol! Add Comment | View Comments Friday, 12th December 2008 I celebrated finishing my rewrite of THE MOST INTIMATE PLACE (Maia Press, summer 09) by having a sinus operation last week and asked my kids what DVDs I should watch while I recover. Quick as a flash they were doing impressions of The Elephant Man ('my schname ish Woseshamary Fwerber'), followed by Dumbo, Pinocchio and ... Death Becomes Her! (No, I have NOT had plastic surgery, thank you, if I had that sort of money to play with, I’d buy a motorbike.) People had been queuing through several postal districts to assure me that a sinus op was terribly painful and would do me no good. With big smiles on their faces as if it was funny! Well, my suave surgeon knew better. He said that the operation wouldn’t hurt at all and should make me feel much better after about a week. Spot on. I’d never had general anaesthetic before and asked him what it would be like. ‘Oh it’s lovely, Rosemary, you’ll love it,’ he said, ‘it’s like drugs.’ The anaesthetist was more on my wavelength when she said it would be like a gin and tonic, just seconds before a feeling like ten gins and tonics came at me very fast. I woke five minutes later to find that two hours had passed and my breathing had already improved. Only one downside really: I have to avoid physical exercise for a fortnight, so my birthday spacehopper is still in its box. Love and thanks to my daughter and to my friends who helped me recover (you know who you are). Also to Kirsty Brooks for her talented nursing. Among other things Kirsty held my hand while the anaesthetic took effect; it was one of the most moving things to happen to me for years. Add Comment | View Comments Monday, 8th December 2008 I’ve come out of my writing tunnel to find the world changed almost beyond recognition. There’s a clever, brown-skinned family waiting to move into the White House, poor old Mumbai’s gone up in smoke and everybody’s potless. But some of the most thrilling things in life are still (nearly) free, like finishing my rewrite of THE MOST INTIMATE PLACE. I’ve been working on that thriller (among lots of other things) for about ten years and it’s done! I did the last tweak and emailed it to the Maia Press last Tuesday, just in time for a great meeting about how we’re going to make sure as many of you as possible will be able to get hold of it. (You’ll always be able to order through this site, by the way.) That’s the trouble with writing a book. You think the work’s done when you finish the first draft, but it’s not. You think it’s done when you find a publisher but they usually want another rewrite or even two. You think it’s done when you hold the book in your hand and your friends are having a merry old time at your launch, but it’s not. Getting your book into the shops is as big as job as writing the damn thing. But I’m ready! It’s fun of course. Booksellers are lovely people and they really do want to sell good books. It’s the gremlins in accounts who assume that all the human brain longs for is celebrity cooking and misery porn. Now that we’re recessing, it’ll be celebrity porn and misery cooking. Yum. Add Comment | View Comments Monday, 22nd September 2008 This is a week I’ve been looking forward to for quite a while: I’m starting the final edits on The Most Intimate Place to get it ready for publication by the Maia Press next summer. Maggie Hamand is going to be working with me (linking things, looking out for inconsistencies, bringing anything up to date that needs it, going deeper sometimes too) and I can’t tell you how much I’m looking forward to it. I admire Maggie in so many ways: not only does her press produce top quality writing inside beautiful covers, she’s also a theologian in her spare time. What mother who runs a business has spare time, but she manages it! So I’m going into my writing tunnel now, my loves, to have the time of my life. Add Comment | View Comments Saturday, 13th September 2008 Ten cheers for the Big Green Bookshop in Wood Green. They’ve just got ten more copies of What You See Is What You Get, not just because they’d sold out but because their children’s reading group has chosen it (chosen it!!!) to be their October book of the month. What a fantastic book shop it is. On the table by the door are the usual current novels and … HG Wells’ The Time Machine. Why’s that there? Well, because they like it really, it’s that kind of place. They're clever and lovely and they set up shop because the local Waterstone’s closed down, thinking that Wood Green didn’t need books. Well, anybody can make a mistake. Six months on, the Big Green Bookshop is thriving. Add Comment | View Comments Saturday, 6th September 2008 Thank God for Sarah Palin, she's an inspiration. You never thought you’d hear me say that, did you, but I wonder if maybe some of these characters I'm making up are a touch extreme sometimes. I look at Sarah Barracuda and I think Hell, no. I can write what I like. Add Comment | View Comments Saturday, 6th September 2008 I saw a rough cut of Fred Rowson’s film last night. No voice over yet, so it’s hard to know what’s going on but who needs Guy Ritchie, it’s Fred who’s our home-grown genius. He’s made me (god knows how) into a comic actress. The scene where Raj and I are distressed parents is hilarious and Fred’s planning to extend it to squeeze out more laughs. But Best Newcomer has to go to the gorgeous Maddie Battersby whose cameo is only minutes long but her eye-rolling is fantastic. She and I are already planning our big frocks for the premiere. Hell yeah. Add Comment | View Comments Wednesday, 3rd September 2008 I’ve been reading Evelyn Waugh’s Waugh in Abyssinia. I love Waugh: a snob yes, but never a word wasted. In this one he’s a war correspondent trying to find stories and nothing’s going on, loads of nothing, but that doesn’t stop the rumours flying. A telegram comes from London asking for detail on an alleged ‘nurse upblown’. (Telegrams used to cost by the word.) Waugh spends the day discovering that it didn’t happen. His cheap and cheerful reply? ‘Nurse unupblown.’ Add Comment | View Comments Wednesday, 13th August 2008 I’m so excited: a beautiful woman with large breasts is face down in a stone cell managing to look tasteful and incredibly sexy, and dead, all at the same time. She can be my body double any time. I’m looking at the new cover for The Most Intimate Place, my novel being published early next year by the Maia Press. It’s always a wonderful experience to see a cover. It means the book could actually happen, though you can’t really be sure until you see it on a bookshop’s shelf. The cover for my kids’ novel What You See Is What You Get was great but the publisher’s first suggestion was more like a Victorian factory than a Gothic abbey. They didn’t mind a bit when I asked them to take off the chimneys... This is a fantastic day for another reason too. My darling children are all on gap years at the same time, so this place is often like a spill-over set for Big Brother with partially dressed youngsters lolling around swapping impenetrable quips until the next lot of food pitches up. So I’ve got myself a studio. I’m going out to work for a change. One of the best things about being a writer is that I’ve been around whenever my kids needed me, at the sickbed, school gate, dentist’s, therapist’s or whatever. But it can be one of the worst things too. People keep breezing into my room thinking that I’m free to drop everything and do whatever vital thing they’ve thought up for me to do next. To be fair, I am often staring into space like a blonde transfixed by the bit on the orange juice carton that says ‘concentrate’. But soon I’ll be able to do my staring somewhere else, and with luck I'll have peace to hear my inner voices, my characters, again. As George Burns would have said, happiness is having a large, loving, caring family in another postal district Add Comment | View Comments Saturday, 12th July 2008 Get your hard hats, I’ve been acting again. Badly of course. They praised my Lady Macbeth at school which was nice, except that I was playing Bernarda Alba at the time. But I keep being asked and it seems churlish to refuse. So the back of my head (my best angle) featured briefly in the film of Blake Morrison’s book ‘When Did You Last See My Father?’ and now up-and-coming young film director Fred Rowson has asked me to be in his latest comedy short, The King of Deptford Creek. I was in Fred’s first film - about a man hunting Big Foot in south east London, a gently hilarious study of madness and rus in urbe - so I was surprised to be asked again. That first time I had to speak and pat Fred’s dog at the same time (don’t let anybody tell you this acting thing’s easy). This time I just had to sit and hold Raj Soolia’s hand all afternoon. Raj is lovely, so it wasn’t difficult and Fred seemed pleased with the outcome. Fred takes enormous pains with his work, and is amazingly calm and organised for a 19 year old. I foresee great things for him. Add Comment | View Comments Tuesday, 8th July 2008 It’s been a case of good girls keep diaries (or blog), bad girls just don’t have the time again. I’m working on a non-fiction book proposal (thanks to my wonderful new agent), which means that I’m all over the place interviewing people about their lives. I won’t give away details here, in case I’m so busy keeping the faith with my deep fat fryer and the washing machine that you go off and do it first, but the interviews are fascinating and wonderful and I want to thank all of you who’ve so kindly given me your time so far. It means that I haven’t touched my novel since the end of March though, and that means that a very big part of me is in a filthy temper, and will be until I get back to it. My inner novelist is a pretty tetchy person if she’s not writing. She kind of slumps inside me, and the other part - the lean, mean, non-fiction machine - has to be especially fit and determined to carry the dead weight. That sounds weird but maybe other novelists know what I’m getting at? Anyway next month I’ll be working on edits of THE MOST INTIMATE PLACE, getting it ready for publication by the Maia Press early next year. I can hardly wait. I have to get the non-fiction thing done first though, so I’d better go. Have a happy summer. Add Comment | View Comments Thursday, 19th June 2008 I’ve got a new agent - whooop! She’s Steph Ebdon of Paterson Marsh, part of The Marsh Agency who have exquisitely glamorous new premises in Albemarle Street, off Piccadilly. I couldn’t be more thrilled. Writing’s such a lonely business sometimes, bashing yourself against a brick wall must feel madly social and sensual in comparison, and having a really good champion makes all the difference. Add Comment | View Comments Monday, 26th May 2008 Dai Davies died of cancer last Monday. He was a top golf journalist and author, widely admired for his prose and judgement. The latter was maybe best displayed when he married my very good friend, Patricia Madill. She was a golf correspondent too, for The Times and it was one of the truly great marriages, full of laughs right to the end. It's typical of Patricia that she's telling everybody that on the day he died, she was at his side telling him about her progress on the history of a local golf club, something they were writing together, and anything else she could think of. The hospice staff had told her that hearing is the last of our senses to fade and she should bathe him in the sound of her voice, which she duly did. Dai gathered all his strength to lean forward and utter his last word in her ear: ‘Sssssh’. Add Comment | View Comments Tuesday, 20th May 2008 Police stopped a double-decker bus not far from where I live and arrested a gang of 24 boys aged between 14 and 18. They stripped them of their weapons: six knives, a claw hammer, a metal bar, a mallet, two wrench handles, a metal baseball bat, two screwdrivers and … a corkscrew and a golf club. Who let the middle-class trash into the gang? Add Comment | View Comments Thursday, 1st May 2008 I despair of this language of ours: it combines ‘man’ and ‘date’ and adds ‘exercise’ to produce something as dull as voting, and what could be duller than this mayoral election here in London. The main parties are offering us their remainders and binends and expect us to get all excited. I will go and put my mark on the page now, yes, but only because people went to a good deal of trouble to get that vote for me and I owe it to them. And there’s that thing Churchill’s supposed to have said about how democracy is the worst system of government in the world, except for all the other systems. But I do have that sinking feeling, more than ever before, that most politicians are on this earth to prove that not everything in nature has a useful purpose, and voting does just encourage them. PS 4 May 08: so now we have a Mayor whose middle name is de Pfeffel (trans. piffle). Oh joy. Add Comment | View Comments Wednesday, 30th April 2008 If you’ve tried to email me through this site recently, I’m sorry. People like Trouser Mouse and Rod Almighty have been snowing that email address with so many offers to make my Rolex rock hard all night, that I had to be whisked urgently to the pub to recover from a laughing accident. It was the one from Laurence CockWhopping that made me laugh out loud. As if I had a Rolex anyway. I would love to hear from you though, so please help yourself to the comment boxes, and there’s always facebook of course. Yours ever, Rosy Joystick. PS: forget that, there's a nice new email address in the contact box now and it's got perfect manners. Feel free to use it! Add Comment | View Comments Friday, 28th March 2008 It's done. I'm done. Where's the bar? Add Comment | View Comments Sunday, 16th March 2008 I’ve just come back from a week’s retreat where I’ve been a lean, mean writing machine in the perfect seaside flat above an Italian restaurant, next to Thresher’s. What could be finer? It’s all very rough, still in longhand, and I’ve no idea if it’s any good but I’ll think about that later. With a first draft only one thing that matters and that’s to press on, and in another couple of weeks I should be done. Then I might sleep for a week, and have a party. Add Comment | View Comments Saturday, 8th March 2008 After getting about thirty seconds’ sleep all night because of nerves, I’ve just done a fanfare for the opening of the Big Green Bookshop in Brampton Park Rd, just off Wood Green’s High Street. When Waterstone’s decided to close the local shop, and didn’t listen to a hefty petition, the shop managers decided that Wood Green still deserved a proper bookshop and have set one up themselves. Playing a fanfare in the street to Wood Green’s shoppers was a pretty strange experience, but I had my trumpet teacher Karen Straw beside me and at least she knew what she was doing. By 11am when the tape was cut, the place was crammed full. The shop is small, in fact, and has been lovingly put together in only two weeks by Simon, Tim and friends. It’s also utterly delightful. In among the novels, I found a collection of Neruda’s poems. Simon had left there just in case anybody fancied it. I did. Add Comment | View Comments Friday, 7th March 2008 Good girls keep blogs and diaries; bad girls don’t have the time. Last week my main distraction was grade 5 music theory, my first exam in a very long time. I’d forgotten the full horror. The exam was in a school in New Cross but they’re all exactly the same. That smell of school mash. The lady invigilators who keep whispering and coughing. I had a severe stab of panic on first sight of the school hall – those rows of desks - and the nerves got worse when I looked at the exam paper and realised I’d forgotten my reading glasses. I knew it was a music exam when the bloke behind me started humming. No, I didn’t steal his ideas. Anyway, in the previous week I did four mock papers and managed to pass them all, even the one where I had a go at midnight with quite a lot of house white inside me. (Don’t ask me why I did it, how would I know that sort of thing?) Got a merit for that one in fact. And no, I wasn't marking it myself. Hope it hasn’t been a mistake to do the real one stone cold sober... Add Comment | View Comments Monday, 3rd March 2008 Jill Robinson’s leaving London. This is very sad news for all of us who love her writing groups. It’s even sadder because her darling Stuart is very ill and they have to go back to LA for him to be nursed among their families. I only discovered Jill’s Wimpole Street Writers last summer and wish I’d found her years ago. She is the most wonderful person, with such understanding and generosity where writers are concerned. (She says wryly in Perdido that writers should be treated like convalescents.) Her magic ingredient is food. Twice a week she’d host evenings around her dining table and feed us all. Who’s got pages, she’d say with that lop-sided smile, and we’d know that we’d have to have a damn good excuse not to have three pages tucked in our bag or top pocket. We also knew that our three pages would get the most loving encouragement. Such genius in that length, three pages. Not too much to produce even in the busiest week, never too much to listen to. Jill and her husband Stuart would read their own pages too, of course, and what a privilege that was. Even the way she called us all ‘writers’ was good for the soul - she’d never dream of calling us students or pupils. They say happiness isn’t something you experience, it’s something you remember. I’m not sure about that, but I'll never forget Jill and Stuart. She plans to start something similar in LA. Lucky LA. Add Comment | View Comments Wednesday, 6th February 2008 Who says the internet is reducing the personal touch in our lives? I couldn’t find my copy of Enemies of Promise the other day – must have lent it to somebody - so I had a look on amazon, found that it’s out of print and ordered a second hand copy, nice and cheap. A hard-backed reprint of the 1948 edition has just arrived and inside is a hand-written note to ‘Dear Rosemary’ from Laura of Lazarus Books who hopes I enjoy it. So lovely, like a present from an old friend. I open it and inside are two perfect white feathers, each about six inches long, lying beside Auden’s verse: ‘O plunge your hands in water, Plunge them in up to the wrist, Stare, stare in the basin And wonder what you’ve missed’. Hm. Add Comment | View Comments Monday, 4th February 2008 Writing sometimes feels like life and death, and books probably wouldn’t get done if writers didn’t feel that way. But I’ve been reminded today that the biggest privilege is to nourish real people and love them, and try and keep them alive. Add Comment | View Comments Saturday, 2nd February 2008 I’m living long hand these days. That’s why I haven’t posted here for a while. The prose had been flowing as fast as a sloth pushing his zimmer to court to stand trial for being slothly on the M25, but now I’m about half way through my first draft of LOVED UP (under contract to the Maia Press) with more coming each day. This is thanks to a fantastic fortnight in Whitstable, away from family and other lovely distractions. How did I cope with being so long on my own? I’m used to plenty of voices around and mouths to be filled. So at first I pretended there were other people there too, that I was on an Arvon course or something. On the first night I asked myself what my book’s about and why I bother writing it. Why bother writing at all really. That’s when a great big light bulb went on in my head. I love writing. I do. I’d forgotten that! I love being in my own world where I’m cocooned with my page and a pen, lost in it all. I love it when characters wake me in the night. I love it when I think I know what I’m about to write and it turns out to be totally different. Best of all is the moment when I get up from writing something that has rushed at me fast and hot and might just be good. Writers get so angsty about writing, you’d think we were peace-keeping in Baghdad or tracking rhinos. But when it’s going well, it’s the best fun you can have with your clothes on. So here’s my personal solution to the Blank Page Problem: I fill the first blank page with why I love writing. It turns out to be different each day. And then I’m off. That blank page is pure adventure! It’s better than sitting on a rollercoaster with your greatest love beside you and your belly full of the finest champagne … Do you want to write too? Excellent. Have fun. Add Comment | View Comments Saturday, 19th January 2008 On my first night away in Whitstable, listening to the wind howl straight through the window frames, I sat down to write and set about procrastinating as usual. But without the net, I was stuck. I longed for the cosy library feel of wikipedia and the party roar of facebook, and found myself wondering what Cyril Connolly would put on his list of Enemies of Promise if he were writing now. In 1938 he listed the things that kept writers from doing their best work, and his list ranged from the sort of tireless research that gets you nowhere to journalism, which pays and is in print too quickly and spoils you for Literature. His most famous obstruction was the ‘pram in the hall’, which for him deterred male writers. Female ones didn’t seem to cross his mind. Now it would be the off-road double buggy and baby sling, and fund-raising for school books and SATs and driving them everywhere in case they get shot in the street and gap years and... there's shopping of course, and ‘having a coffee’ and having your nails done and calling it cogitation - I have my nails done, therefore I am - and television. Oh yes, television would definitely go on the list. Watching it. Writing for it (even if your surname is Davies, Russell T or Andrew) and fooling yourself that seeing faded panto dames eat grubs in the jungle is studying the zeitgeist. All a writer needs is (a) peace, (b) determination, (c) pen and paper and (d) more of all the above. And love of course, from loved ones who know when to keep their distance. Add Comment | View Comments Monday, 24th December 2007 Ho ho ho, tis the season to watch out for the splashes of vomit on every platform, couples trying to re-enact the Fairytale of New York, yelling ‘How could you!’ and ‘You’re never touching me ever again’ right there in the middle of Oxford Street and everybody drinking so fast they should have racing colours on the bottles. We buy this year’s presents with next year’s money, and I for one have loaded up on guns that fire elastic bands, slimy centipedes, musical twister and the Scooby doo game, and I might even give some of them away. I’ve vastly over-catered on the chocs and alcohol as usual, and none of it will be wasted. Every Christmas I’m filled all over again with simple amazement and wonder that a single day can take so much preparation and still be worth it. Tis the season to be jolly – I hope yours is wonderful. Add Comment | View Comments Thursday, 13th December 2007 On Tuesday evening I was still thrumming with the power of that fantastic gig when I learned that my first love has suddenly died. I feel as if I can hear one of those WW2 bombs somewhere close and I’m waiting for it to land. We loved so intensely, we could scorch onlookers a hundred paces away and it all ended acrimoniously, as it was bound to, without much dignity for anybody. Putting it behind us was probably the best thing both of us ever did, and we never met again. But that love reverberated on through my life and every now and again, he would appear in my dreams. Always the same dream: we were in a conservatory together, though I haven’t got a conservatory, and he’d hand me a drink and talk about his day as if he was still my husband, as if he still ‘owned’ me. I used to wake from those dreams burning with anger that he was still in my head after all that time and I hadn’t had one for a while until last weekend (after he died but before I knew). I was having a dream about shooing crowds of people away from my desk so that I could bloody well work when who do I see looking for me but him. He’s standing in a dark overcoat and grey woven scarf, the age we are now, as beautiful as ever. We catch eyes, speak a little, and he’s going, hovering, is he going? Yeah, he’s going but we’re connecting, standing square on, and I know he wants me to hold him. Nothing more complicated, he just wants to be held. Which is what I’m about to do, when a woman friend of mine bustles through and takes my hug, the one I was making ready for him. She’s talking at the top of her voice and in no time the crowds are coming back, filling my office again, and my kids are there and he catches my eye one last time, before he turns and walks away, waving. Add Comment | View Comments Monday, 10th December 2007 Yes! I am one of the happy few off to see Led Zeppelin at the O2 tonight. At this hyper-hyped gig of gigs, fandom is far more important than mere money so we queued yesterday for three and a half hours to pick up tickets we'd already paid for, and had plenty of time to wonder why it was taking so long to check everybody. JFK is faster, and they take your mugshot and finger print. Could it really be worth it to hear Stairlift To Heaven and Bin a long time since I lost my hair? Well, the first time I heard Stairway, I saw a roomful of 15 year olds discover that something could be more important than sex. We all peeled off each other and listened, silent, barely moving, as it played ten or twelve times straight through. Nobody did laugh out loud at the lyrics actually. All lyrics were rubbish in those days, ask Ozzy. Besides, I was brought up in a house full of opera, so I was used to tuning out the words and hearing the voice as another musical instrument. On to university where it was the background, no, foreground music of my first love. Four guys clubbed together to afford one copy of Physical Graffiti and we walked like heroes, our bellbottoms trailing like seaweed, down to Andy’s record stall in the market on the day it was released. When that first love went awry, I got furniture and he got the LZ albums, and I don’t have to tell you who got the better deal. Mind you, I wonder how much they’re worth now, those originals of ours, so drenched in beer and tears. Then – love does funny things to you – I married a Cliff fan and became the sort of person who would go to his friends’ wedding rather than hear LZ at Knebworth. I’ve never quite forgiven myself. When Bonham died – one drink killed him, nobody remembers whether it was the 40th or the 41st – the music died too until … yes, I do remember exactly where I was when Pictures at Eleven came out. Percy looking so cool in those chinos. Chinos! For me eighties music is Robert Plant. My kids grew up on Tall Cool One and 29 Palms, and last Christmas my 18 year old took time after a party, three in the morning, to thank me for bringing him up in a house full of Bonham as well as Bach. My brother took a tumble in his luck in 1998 and I made sure we were both at the Clarksdale gig at Wembley. He’s got us into tonight’s gig and if it’s half as good as that Wembley one, it’ll be a stormer. Add Comment | View Comments Saturday, 24th November 2007 The Bookseller to the Stars has interviewed me for his blog. It was surreal actually, a bit like postal chess, but as virtual sensations go, one of the best. If you scroll down www.markfarley.blogspot.com it won’t be long before you come to the interviews in the right hand column and there I am. There’s plenty of highly entertaining stuff on the left side of Mark’s page to distract you too… And on Wednesday (28th) I’ll be on Jill Schary Robinson’s radio show. Jill is a fascinating and wonderful writer and a heroine of mine, though I don’t really do heroines. Her programme is very popular all over the world and consists of relaxed writing chat around her dinner table in Wimpole Street. I’ll be there to talk about being a children’s writer, though I’m not really a children’s writer as such, it’s just one of lots of sorts of writing I’ve done. What You See Is What You Get started off as stories for my own kids and it was pure luck that it got published first. (In fact I didn’t believe it when Wolfhound Press sent the contract; I thought there’d been a mistake and some poor sod was opening my rejection letter while I was reading his royalty clauses.) I really wanted to be a famous playwright by now actually, and spent five or six years up a cul de sac trying to write deathless plays that never happened. That period still breaks my heart! But that’s how it is with writing, you keep writing and perfecting and trying different things, until the day somebody else says yes. And nothing’s ever wasted. Add Comment | View Comments Monday, 19th November 2007 I’ve resorted to desperate measures: I'm not letting myself have a haircut until I've written another 20,000 words. If you see me out and about looking like Boris Johnson without the will to live, please - no need to be polite about it - kick me all the way back to my desk. I do need a haircut, but I need those 20,000 words more. Add Comment | View Comments Sunday, 18th November 2007 I seem to have wakened up a whole year older, which is a shabby trick to play on a person at my age, except that I’ve just had the most fantastic birthday present ever: my first trip to New York. Usually the most exotic travel experience I get is a touch of taxi lag, but last week I was in Manhattan with my husband and all three children. And that first sight of the famous skyline coming in from JFK actually did take my breath away. I was nearly knocked breathless again walking through Times Square, on our way back from seeing a brilliant production of Chicago. A stretch limo misjudged the turn, reversed and pushed forward again, nearly right through me. Within seconds, the crowds were around it, milling past with arms in the air, and I stopped for a fraction of a second (no more, I promise) just to admire the mayhem. Immediately a voice behind me barked in my ear: ‘Ya talking or walkin?’ The kids say I was so busy looking up, it's a miracle I wasn't run over several times but they have a failsafe system in NYC where the split second you’re in the wrong place, about twenty drivers, even from several blocks away, lean on their horns to warn you. Just what I needed as I have to confess that I’ve acquired another vice. I’d never really liked cocktails before, usually because it seems to take at least half an hour to produce a thimbleful of something that tastes of horse shit mixed with nail varnish remover without the insouciant charm. But I promised myself that on my first night in NYC, I’d raise a Manhattan (vin du pays and all that) in honour of Dorothy Parker in the Algonquin hotel. One? Who said one? ... Nothing a trip up the Empire State couldn’t cure of course, where King Kong was actually running up and down the marble halls, I swear. A little shopping was done, I will not lie. A woman’s place is in the mall after all. But we were there for a bar mitzvah on Upper West Side and it was, I have to say, a most glorious experience. You might get a flavour if I say that gammon was served at the family get-together the night before, and the entire ceremony took place in a restaurant. A young female rabbi led us with terrific grace and gentleness through the whole procedure and I loved the easy banter between her and young Jamie whose big day it was, and who acquitted himself with faultless maturity. I left London tired and came back exhausted, and wouldn't have missed a second. My favourite experiences other than the bar mitzvah? The Frick, and Toys R Us on Times Square! Add Comment | View Comments Sunday, 4th November 2007 This site’s just been updated! The biog has the latest on my lovely new contract from the Maia Press for two novels (for adults this time – sorry, kids) and the most fun could be that now you can comment on what I say here. I’m half way, no, about a third of the way through a first draft at the minute and will be talking about how that feels. Anybody who writes knows what a quagmire the middle section can be. Some writers do the finish first so that they’ve got something to aim for. Makes some sense if you know where you’re going, but only if you do. And of course the one and only thing that matters with a first draft is not whether it’s any good or whether it remotely resembles what you set out to write, but that it gets finished. I was talking to Anne Redmon who's a hugely experienced novelist last week about how if you can’t get to the desk for a few days, the characters seem to get huffy and wander away. Mine gang up and head into town for a party without inviting me. It’s a hell of a business getting them all back and in condition for work! Yes, I know it’s mad, of course it is. But then as Alan Alda said, insanity's just a state of mind. Add Comment | View Comments Sunday, 4th November 2007 Hey! You've asked already where my gorgeous trumpeters went. Don't worry, marvellous Mark of 1staspect (all-purpose website genius) is working on a photo gallery for us here - they'll be back soon! Add Comment | View Comments Friday, 19th October 2007 What is a snicket and why is it lemony? What did the Very Hungry Caterpillar turn into? If you know and you’re anywhere near Waterstone’s in Greenwich tomorrow morning, would you like to come to my family book quiz? We’re taking over the Costas coffee shop on the first floor from 11 o’clock and there’ll be questions for all age groups from babies to grandparents. I’ll be trying to keep some sort of order. See you there! Add Comment | View Comments Wednesday, 10th October 2007 Today my mother would have been eighty, if she hadn't died in February 1985 after over twelve years of cancer. To borrow a line from Forrest Gump, that's all I have to say about that. Add Comment | View Comments Tuesday, 25th September 2007 It’s not often Greenwich hosts a film premiere but last night the great and the good of south east London crammed into the Picturehouse to see the new film of Blake Morrison’s memoir And When did you last see your father? Blake’s book was published fourteen or fifteen years ago to huge acclaim, and Anand Tucker has taken six weeks and a tiny budget to make an excellent film of it. Colin Firth does a beautiful job as Blake (Blake must have been a very good boy in a previous life, is all I’m going to say) and the bath scene is unmissable. Juliet Stevenson puts in a deft performance as his mother, with her smile in the final scene illuminating the whole film. Jim Broadbent plays the ogre father with huge sensitivity, and Sarah Lancashire is wonderful as the father’s controversial friend Beaty. Why am I mentioning all this here? Because last March Blake asked friends to come and fill out an award ceremony scene as extras. We were up before the dawn to present ourselves at the National Liberal club for one of the most ridiculous and hilarious days of my life. The family have awarded my husband Best Supporting Actor award for listening to Jim Broadbent for a whole three seconds without butting in, and I get Best Back of Head Visible for One Second or Less. Thank you, thank you, you’ll have to forgive me, I was so surprised to get this award, I dropped my speech. Add Comment | View Comments Monday, 24th September 2007 Too much of a good thing can be wonderful. I’ve just had lunch with Maggie Hamand of the Maia Press and over the spicy aubergine in Soho she handed me a contract for TWO novels: The Most Intimate Place and the one, still nameless, that I’m working on at the minute. Bertrand Russell thought that the secret of happiness is to face the fact that the world is ‘horrible, horrible, horrible’. Well, he wasn’t hanging around with the right people. Maia is a small literary press, very highly thought of, and I like and admire Maggie very much. I couldn’t be happier. Add Comment | View Comments Thursday, 20th September 2007 Success is supposed to be relative - the more success you get, the more relatives – and it was fantastic to see my friend Dreda Mitchell surrounded by her family at Islington Borders last night launching her thriller, Killer Tune. Dreda and I met at the first writing course I ever took, in the 90s at Goldsmiths’. It was a weirdish course but deep ties were made, not least between Dreda and her Tony. When was it exactly? Well, I could swear I was up to my eyes in bibs and calpol until at least 1994, but Dreda reckons it was earlier and Dreda's always right, or so she tells me. Anyway, she won the Crime Writers Association's John Creasey Memorial Dagger Award 2005 for Running Hot, and Killer Tune is (somehow) even better. I tell you, those pages are turning faster than Richard Hammond on a greased cheetah. Add Comment | View Comments Wednesday, 19th September 2007 I’ve just come back from holiday and found a box of author copies of You’re Nicked on the doorstep. My 21 year old son grabbed one and didn’t budge from the armchair until he’d read it straight through. And yes, he did laugh. Spotting a stranger reading something you’ve written is a thrill, but when the nearest and dearest are engrossed, that's an even deeper pleasure. Add Comment | View Comments Monday, 20th August 2007 I’m in shock. My next oeuvre, a collection of daft crimes and criminals called You’re Nicked, is due out next month and I’m told it has the honour of being marketed next to something called What Shat That. You have to admire the poetry of that title but I suspect it’s more waste pipe than Waste Land. You’re Nicked should be available from the last week of Sept. Add Comment | View Comments Sunday, 19th August 2007 Yes, it was yo ho ho and a bottle of Coke in Greenwich Waterstone’s yesterday where the big read for children had a pirate theme. Kids all know what a pirate looks like these days - it's Johnny Depp playing the spawn of Keith Richards - but it was fun to remind them just how much of what we think about pirates comes from the written word. There’s Treasure Island for a start. (This 1990 film couldn’t be better: Oliver Reed as Billy Bones, Christopher Lee as Blind Pew, young Christian Bale as Jim.) I let Blind Pew grab Jim and tip Billy Bones the black spot right there in the middle of the shop, and tap his way down toward the river, before we moved on to Peter Pan and the bit where Hook plots to kidnap Wendy and Peter teases Hook that he’s a codfish. I did lots of different voices, as you do, and there were giggles all over the shop when my posh Hook accent deepened and morphed into Lady Thatcher. Which worked beautifully of course but was a pretty bloody sinister experience for me. As Gloria of Waterstone’s said though, once you shake the Disney sugar off Peter Pan, it is very funny; Peter is in fact ‘a little sod’. At the King’s Road branch, lots of little girls were having their faces exquisitely painted with butterflies, ready to hear me read Eric Carle’s The Very Hungry Caterpillar. I’d forgotten what a treat it is to read to little ones. My kids loved this story so much, they used to fight about who could have it under their pillow. I had to buy them a copy each. Add Comment | View Comments Tuesday, 14th August 2007 This Saturday Waterstone’s are having a big read for children all over the place and you’ll find me at the Greenwich branch (turn left out of Cutty Sark DLR station) reading for the 10 plus age group at 11am, and at the King’s Road branch reading my favourite story for little kids, The Very Hungry Caterpillar, at 3pm. I’m not sure what I’m going to read at Greenwich. If you’ve any suggestions, I’d love to hear them. (Keep it clean, kids, please – there might be adults looking.) Add Comment | View Comments Sunday, 22nd July 2007 Yesterday my daughter was in bed with such a sore throat, I said I’d nip down to Waterstone’s and buy her Harry Potter and the Llanelli Shallows to cheer her up. I expected to be clambering over lorry loads of copies to get to the till but I couldn’t see any anywhere. I asked where the staff were hiding them. Had I ordered, I was asked. Ordered? I’d no idea you had to order. Well, sorry but they were sold out. By three in the afternoon? My daughter had been looking forward to it so much, she was ill in bed, I'd have to go back empty handed ... I'd almost moved myself to tears when a lovely man in a cycle helmet said that he and his wife had over-enthused and ordered an extra copy, would I like it? I could have kissed him. While the book was bagged up and bought, I explained how my daughter had adored the first six books and he’d no idea the difference it would make to her, what a saint he was etc. Gently he asked, your poor daughter, how old is she? I could hear laughter all over the store when I answered. I think I even heard it out in the street. She’s twenty-two. Which is of course the perfect age for a Potter fan: she and Harry were 12 together and it’s not her fault she’s grown up faster than he has. She's had the book twenty four hours now, is two thirds through and my girl who never cries is in floods of tears. Friends in their thirties are in the same condition! Who cares if the style makes Stephen King look like Flaubert, this is big. Credit where it’s due. Add Comment | View Comments Friday, 20th July 2007 I was going to write about how the smoking ban’s going to be the death of our national literary life. Think of almost any great writer of the past and they’ve got a cigarette stuck to the lip or fingers, from Marlowe and Raleigh (who can take the credit) through Greene, Kingsley Amis, Sartre, de Beauvoir, Auden and co, Coward and Rattigan, Fitzgerald (though drink did for him), Hemingway (likewise plus guns, always a fun mix) and Hunter Thompson (the fun mix plus drugs) right up to the valiant bastions of today like Bainbridge, Amis junior, Will Self and Martin Rowson, not forgetting both tutors on my recent (brilliant) Arvon course, Patrick Neate and Anne Redmon. Smokes and writing go together, don’t they? The muse likes a jumpstart? That’s what I was going to say … Then my youngest (and I do try to be a better example occasionally) said that surely all these writers would have expressed their talent anyway. Everybody smoked in the old days, and loads of them didn’t write well or at all, they just coughed and died. Who’s to say those geniuses wouldn’t have written more and better if they’d lived longer? Good point. I didn’t argue. But this notion that talent will always out? I wonder. I know so many good writers who don’t get recognised. Some get discouraged before they even finish a first draft, let alone find an agent and/or publisher and push on through the many rewrites to unwrap the book one day and then discover how hard it is to get a bookshop to stock it. It’s not talent that makes the difference, it seems to me, it’s commitment, perseverance and a judicious mix of sanity and insanity. Do fags help? I don’t know. I’ve given up again. I know it’s easy, I’ve done it so many times before. Add Comment | View Comments Tuesday, 10th July 2007 Greenwich Waterstone’s have just pre-ordered 50 copies of You’re Nicked for September, hoorayyy! Add Comment | View Comments Monday, 9th July 2007 At the Crime Writers’ awards last week Fred Vargas (who won the Duncan Lawrie International Dagger) was a double surprise: she’s a she, with a genius for tousled chic, and she’s also an excellent stand-up comic. Much funnier than the English translations of her novels. But Bob Marshall-Andrews QC gave us the biggest laugh. He was there to advise from his years of experience as a criminal barrister around the country, and said he was defending a chap in Devon once who had developed a gentle, yet passionate attachment to several of his cattle. Opening for the defence, he explained that his client had been discovered partially clothed, yes, standing on a milk churn close to the rear of the cow in question. But the act had not actually been fully consummated. The cow had shifted and kicked the churn over before any crime could ensue. A voice was heard from the jury box: ‘Yer. They do that sometimes.’ Add Comment | View Comments Thursday, 5th July 2007 I’ve just laughed out loud at George Melly’s two-page obituary in the Times, which I'm sure is what he'd have wanted. Great man. He didn’t give a damn who he shocked, and merrily blamed his mother for him being gay until he was about 30 (as if he needed an excuse) because she was very keen on gay actors and always filled the house with them when he was growing up. I’ve often wondered if his mother was as happy with his exuberant sexual life style as all that. When I was at College of Law, I was George’s mother's lodger, and she did indeed talk about Liverpool and the gay actors and how broad-minded everybody was when George was growing up. She could go on for quite a while actually, often after I’d had a long hard day at the law library and she was getting between me and the pub. Lovely lady though. Was she so liberal with me? No. No male guests, at all, ever. It was an extremely dry summer and we were not supposed to bath in more than two inches of water, so she left a ruler for me in the bathroom. George's old wooden school one apparently, suitably bendy. Just the six inches, since you ask. Clothes had to be hand washed too, and I did my jeans one day, spread them on a chair to dry, legs wide, and went off to college. I came back, heard about the gay actors again, and Liverpool, and George’s genius as a painter, that was another favourite topic, and went to collapse in my room. She’d been in (though she wasn’t supposed to) and folded the legs of my jeans primly together. Add Comment | View Comments Wednesday, 4th July 2007 My plan for world domination has had to go under review. My next novel, The Most Intimate Place, was due to come out next year … but publication’s been postponed until 2009. I’ve always been impressed by the Maia Press and they’d be perfect for this book, so they are worth waiting for. But I know this will disappoint the lots of you who have read the sample here and have kindly told me how very much you’re looking forward to the rest. Sorry. World Domination Plan B is of course in place: I’m doing the only thing a writer can do, which is to get on with novel no. 3 as quickly and strongly as I can. I’ll post samples soon… Add Comment | View Comments Saturday, 16th June 2007 Being a judge is pants, especially if you’re the Court of Appeal judge who was in the dock this week. He was going to feature in You're Nicked, my collection of weird crimes due out this September ... ‘First you forget names,’ George Burns said, ‘then you forget faces. Next you forget to pull your zipper up and finally you forget to pull it down.’ Court of Appeal judge, Lord Justice Richards, might have reached the third stage of wisdom, but the woman sitting opposite him didn’t forget his face. He’s been charged with exposing more than his sensitive side on the Wimbledon to Waterloo train. (Mirror, 3 March 2007) … But last week the judge whipped out his very own Calvins in court to display his innocence, arguing it was nigh on impossible to get anything out of them, on the train or anywhere else. Perhaps this should be a PHSE question in schools: Calvins, accessibility, discuss. Anyway, whatever went on in the jury room (my mind is still merrily boggling), he was acquitted. Good for him. And he’s cut from You’re Nicked. Add Comment | View Comments Friday, 8th June 2007 I love the net. From the top of its geeky bald head to the soles of its pork pie shoes, I adore it. Thanks to lovely Shauna from my Arvon course last week, I’ve made it onto facebook and what a glorious waste of time facebook is. It just sucks away the hours and is doing my laugh lines no good at all. I’ve hooked up with (no, mustn’t say that, I’ve caught up with) a writing friend I thought I’d lost, and discovered that for the last 22 years I’ve been living minutes away from a Belfast school friend I haven’t seen since I was 12. (She knows where the bodies are buried: we were at a school I was nearly sacked from.) Like everything human, the net has its darkness but this sunlit party side is superb. Add Comment | View Comments Monday, 4th June 2007 Writing’s more dangerous than I thought. I’d made it back from my writing course in Shropshire and was ‘resting my eyes’ in a deckchair when I dropped The Seven Basic Plots on my toe, all 728 pages of it. Is this comedy or tragedy? I’m still not sure. One thing I am sure of though is that the Arvon Foundation is a fantastic way to bring on writing skills, in anybody. My course last week was even more rewarding than I expected and I've been on an Arvon course before, so I knew to expect a lot. Anne Redmon and Patrick Neate both brought fantastic passion and generosity to the week. They were great fun too - Anne's story of being stuck in the desert with Marilyn French had us on our knees with laughter. Anne worked on my confidence (which badly needs it, despite appearances to the contrary) and in a single tutorial Patrick saw what was holding back the flow of my novel. Heartfelt thanks to them both. My fellow students were wonderful. Everybody produced excellent writing and with the help of a shedload of wine and fags, we stretched our talents for midnight bollocks-talk to new heights as well. Patrick left us all with the best advice about writing fiction, which is to write every day. Simple as that. It’s not the quality that matters (talking first drafts here) and it’s not quantity either. It’s frequency that counts. ‘Don't get it right, get it written!’ Add Comment | View Comments Sunday, 27th May 2007 This time tomorrow I’ll be in John Osborne’s house in Shropshire on an Arvon Foundation course led by Patrick Neate and Anne Redmon. I’m hoping to pick up a few pointers on plot and structure, and to wallow in the company of writers for a whole week. Not quite a whole week actually, as I’ll have to steal away at the crack of dawn on Friday to join in one of the most surreal musical fixtures in England, the Whit Friday Marches on Saddleworth. Lots of villages there host a brass band contest each, in the deadly serious brass band way, and any band can pitch up and join in. So we park the coach where we can and park ourselves in various pubs until it’s our turn. Then we march through the village playing a march (Great Escape last year, Ghostbusters this time) until we get to a field or car park where there's an adjudicator stuck on his own in a tent and we play a more traditional march for him. (Yes, it’s always a him.) Don’t laugh, we won money last time, almost enough for a round of drinks. I took up the trumpet six years ago and never dreamt I’d wind up marching behind police horses through packed villages in Yorkshire with a cornet stuck on my face. Our drummer got so excited last year, he bust his bass drum. He turned it round and carried on barely missing a beat. We finished our fifth contest just before midnight under stars and fairy lights, ratarsed and completely knackered, to a huge ovation. Glorious. Add Comment | View Comments Friday, 18th May 2007 Another spectacular victory for my team at the Authors vs Customers quiz in Waterstone’s in Kensington High Street last night. Congrats to Alison Weir, Sophia McDougall, Robyn Young and our captain Alice Hogge on digging up all sorts of obscure and hilarious facts; I wouldn’t be surprised if they can come up with another word for thesaurus and know why onomatopoeia doesn’t sound like anything. We had Lois the store manager on our team too, which gave us the advantage of the wine supply as well as her excellent brain. Our quizmaster Marcus Berkmann says that if in doubt, we should always go for the elegant answer. He certainly goes for elegant questions. Marilyn Munroe wore nothing but five drops of what in bed? Chanel No 5. Which American singer/song writer was driver to a senior Buddhist monk 1994 – 1999? Leonard Cohen. Samuel Rogers (1763 – 1855) lent his overcoat to two poet laureates who were … Wordsworth and Tennyson. I’m new to quizzes and had no idea they're such fun. Very many thanks to Lois and her staff - they were outstanding. This writers' quiz season is taking a rest now until the autumn. If you can't wait that long, Marcus hosts a quiz night here every Tuesday evening. Best of luck. Add Comment | View Comments Thursday, 17th May 2007 That was pretty confident, wasn’t it, saying I was back in the saddle. As if I just sit down at the desk and turn out a book like turning on the garden hose. Some books do come easily - Saul Bellow said that for one of his books, he just had to be there and catch it in buckets – but this latest one of mine has being flowing like glue, with the jokes taking off like penguins. Can’t have that. I've had family distractions lately but I've never seen that as an excuse and I'm not starting now. There's fear of course, that the book won't be good enough or to make it good enough could take years, wouldn’t it be easier to bin it now and run away? In fact, why bother to write anything ever again? … But this story is following me like true love with a conviction for stalking, so I broke the big task down into lots of little ones, and made myself a more realistic schedule than hoping that it'll fall out of the sky perfect by the beginning of the summer so I can go away and relax. While I was doing this efficient stuff, my pen dawdled over the page and I found I'd written something else too. Something I’d forgotten. It was that I write because it’s exciting. There’s nothing like the thrill of sitting down to write and finding that by the end of the day, by lunchtime even, I’ve been part of something I didn’t foresee at all, something astonishing. Add Comment | View Comments Saturday, 5th May 2007 You’re Nicked is finished. I’ve just emailed my collection of stupid criminals to my publisher. Done and dusted, and two months early too. The publisher wants it now and it worked for me to do it while all my kids were around for the Easter holidays. Now that I've got relative peace, I’m going back to my novel, for the third time. I wrote a first draft in October 2005 in three weeks flat, but it wasn’t right and I turned to other things like finishing The Most Intimate Place. That October idea (still nameless) kept badgering me though. Last autumn I said here that trying to nail it down was a bit like trying to find a horse and knowing my luck it could turn out like this. So far I could just about make out a shape in the distance and every time I went near, it vanished. Well, I’d got close enough before Easter to feel its breath mixing with mine and for it to let me grab a hank of mane and climb up. Though it feels wild at the minute, I’m hoping for this sort of exciting too with a twist of sadness. Great to be back in the saddle. Add Comment | View Comments Saturday, 28th April 2007 My brother’s become what the medics call an organ donor. He’s bought a Ducati ST3, as yellow as a daffodil with, I hope, the Lord’s Prayer printed in easyread on the tacho. People who buy bikes that size should have their heads examined, and often do - easy, tiger. The last time I saw him on two wheels he could fit comfortably into my biker jacket. (Imagine that, children.) Been writing your name in hot rubber on the M40 yet, Davy? Or is it all a joke and you’ve really got one of these? What about when winter comes and you can't feel your fingers and toes, and the rain's settling in a chilly puddle between your legs? Four wheels good, two still better. If you fancy joining the ducatisti at the North West 200, I’ll be happy to come along and put the playing cards in the spokes for you. Add Comment | View Comments Friday, 27th April 2007 It doesn’t matter whether you win or lose, it’s whether I win or lose that counts. Who said that? Homer Simpson probably - well, he should have been in my quiz team in Putney Waterstone’s last night along with Alison Weir, Sophia McDougall, Robert Low and Alice Hogge. Only the five of us against tables of six all bristling with intellectuals. (Hang on, didn’t Auden say that an intellectual was somebody who’d found something more interesting to think about than sex? No, I don’t think I’ve met one either. OK, bristling with people who looked too clever by three quarters.) But we won! Thanks to Alice for her expertise in Ant & Dec, and to Rob and Alison for being the only 2 people in the room to recognise the dates of the Pony Express. Sophia weighed in with vital info about Keats and Scott Fitzgerald (can you guess what that question was?) and I must have known something but I can’t remember what. A good team effort but special congratulations go to Alison Weir. If she doesn’t know the answer to a question, there isn’t one. She had the lyrics to You’re Beautiful, no problem at all with the ten most popular pub names in England and when our quiz master Marcus Berkmann dared to ask which queen featured in Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary, Alison had chapter and verse to prove that it was not Mary, Queen of Scots as he dared to suggest, but Mary Tudor. If you fancy taking us on, the next similar bash is at Waterstone's Kensington on May 17th from 7pm. Add Comment | View Comments Friday, 20th April 2007 A lot of the people who died in Virginia Tech on Monday were the same age as my children. A lot of people died in Baghdad this week too. Which made me wonder about quantity. Big numbers. The Baghdad slaughter took me back to the sense we had when I was growing up in Northern Ireland that the horrors happening there every day were just boring to everybody else. Big numbers do get attention. Journalists get excited. Politicians love them - maybe it makes them feel needed. Above all, the perpetrators love quantity because, in the West at least, their name is attached to the deed and they get the celebrity that passes here for life after death. But does a big number make us feel more? Deanne Asamoah made it to a News in Brief in the Times this week. She sounds like a really brave wee love. She’d been looking after her terminally ill mother on her own for four years when she overdosed on the morphine prescribed for her mum. She was 13. Her death came with a big number beside it too: Barnardo's reckon that about 175,000 children are in her situation in the UK. As John Cheever said, sometimes 'courage tastes of blood'. Add Comment | View Comments Friday, 13th April 2007 Charles Ingram. Has nobody told him that there are only two rules when you're dealing with teenagers? Rule 1: never raise your fists, it leaves your groin unprotected. Rule 2: in case of extreme provocation, see rule 1. Ingram's so fed up with people coughing at him that he’s been back in court this week. He’s the one who tried to defraud Who Wants To Be A Millionaire. He combined phone-a-friend, ask-the-audience and flu by getting a friend in the audience to tell him the answers with coughs. Long time ago, but a 13 year old boy hadn’t forgotten. He saw the major jogging past, so he greeted him with a hearty cough. Which a lot of people do apparently. Joke? Ingram didn’t think so, he grabbed the boy by the lapels and threatened him. The major, who didn't deny it, was convicted but got an absolute discharge. The wisdom of Solomon. I suspect the magistrates live with teenagers who, as they say, are God's punishment for having sex. Have I got room for the major in You're Nicked, my collection of bizarre crimes? You bet. Add Comment | View Comments Wednesday, 11th April 2007 You’re Nicked is acquiring a substantial ‘love’ section. A couple of examples: Thomas Stepiowski was working in Dorset factory and missed his Polish homeland so much, he took to fondling women’s breasts and pinching their bottoms while making grunting noises. The ‘Polish Borat’ claimed this behaviour was normal in Eastern Europe. Weymouth magistrates didn’t agree. Neither, incidentally, did his female interpreter. He was jailed for nine months. (Daily Mail, 8 November 2006) Meanwhile on the Mumbai sea front, more than 100 couples discovered the price of love when they were arrested for kissing and holding hands. Kissing in public is technically illegal in India. Lovers carted off for being found in ‘objectionable positions’ faced fines of up to 1,200 rupees (£14.30). (Times, 7 April 2007) I came back from something the other night to find Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind on television. When I start working on my novel again, I would love to find such an urgent and beautiful context for exploring heartbreak. Of my two main characters, one ends happily, the other not so (damn, I've given it all away) because that's the way it is with love. Plenty of films show the joy and sense of victory and sweetness when girl finds boy and boy finds girl again, how lovely. Not so many films look at the price we pay when there is no happy ending, at the aftermath and the dreadful trudge back to some sort of life. Eternal Sunshine takes a hard look at that damage, and asks what it’s for, and asks with such style. Add Comment | View Comments Saturday, 7th April 2007 Tonight's my seventh social event in ten days. My heart says yes. My head says yes. What does my liver say? It can tell me after the Boat Race. Today’s race (4.30pm) features the heaviest man ever to take part: Cambridge stroke Thorsten Engelmann weighs nearly 111kg (245lb). Quite a lot of it could be brain but you can never tell these days. Reminds me that within a week or so of arriving at university I went along to a college boat club do, ready for anything, and found myself among lads so tall it was like standing in a forest. It was one of the high water marks of my life actually. I was given an oar, loved it and discovered sport for the first time. I did recover of course, and this afternoon I’ll be yelling at the telly with a can in my hand in the traditional way. But my heart will be crashing at the start and I’ll remember that feeling of terror combined with rigor mortis and feel pretty bloody glad it’s not me out there. But is the boat race really a spectator sport? This is a spectator sport. I’ve reached the half way mark, by the way, in writing my sensitive exposition of bizarre criminal activity, You’re Nicked, to be published by Crombie Jardine in the autumn. Warm pomagne all round, whatever the liver says. Bolly when it’s done. (PS: congrats to Cambridge on their perfect combination of size and technique. Could swear that's Prince William getting a soaking second from the right. More use than ornament after all..) Add Comment | View Comments Friday, 30th March 2007 Another day, another book launch. This time it was south of the river (only just) at the Hayward Gallery to welcome Blake Morrison’s novel South of the River. Boy was this an A-list event. As I said to Maureen Freely (who translates Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk), I can’t stand name-droppers so I won’t bother to mention that among those who turned out and got busy being famous together were Margaret Drabble, Michael Frayn, Wendy Cope, Graham Swift and Andrew Motion. Though he’d had fulsome reviews already, Blake actually seemed nervous about the book’s reception and while thanking his agent, he remembered that eleven years after his first commission he’d had to pay back the advance! No chance of that happening with this one. I don’t generally read long fiction – busy mother, no time - but I've read all five hundred and whatever pages of South of the River and it's a beautiful book, readable, wise, sexy and funny. It has great range without letting the reader feel the strain for a moment, and the most moving bit, I think, is the description of Jack’s care of his dying wife. I have Blake to thank for getting to know Maureen on the set of a forthcoming film of his memoir And When Did You Last See Your Father; when Blake asked his friends if they'd like to be ‘literary’ extras for a day, we both fancied an adventure. Yes, I did laugh when I heard that Colin Firth was to star as Blake (who was laughing first of course, was Johnny Depp too busy etc) and didn’t quite believe the whole enterprise until I was sitting on set in somebody else’s glad rags being paid to smoke free cigarettes while resting my eyes on said Mr Firth delivering Blake’s lines. There are worse ways to spend a morning. Add Comment | View Comments Thursday, 29th March 2007 I look like something out of a Tim Burton movie today, or maybe I mean John Prescott, after last night’s launch of a new biography of David Cameron, the man who hopes to get the UK back to its knees. The co-authors are James Hanning and Francis Elliott, both of the Independent on Sunday, and (amazingly) it’s a first venture into authorship for both of them. I’ve known James Hanning a good many years and he’s one of the loveliest and most sanguine people ever born, so I wasn’t in the least surprised when I asked if they’d had any trouble co-operating and Francis said there had been no moments of froideur, no. (I love it when journalists use French, it reminds me of my kids showing off their swimming badges.) It was clever to hold the launch up school here, being politically neutral, yet across the road from the Houses of Parl on the evening when the Lords were doing their best to scupper the government's casino plans. Lord Lamont and AN Wilson were among the many people scanning the index for their own names and the whole occasion was wonderfully suave. Best of luck, James and Francis. Political biogs are not my favourite bedtime reading but I’ve dipped in – yes, the text, not just the pictures – and it looks like a belter. Add Comment | View Comments Friday, 23rd March 2007 There’s a rumour going round that I’m writing a raunchy novel. How could people say such a thing? I am indeed writing something with the working title Love Goddess. And it is quite spicy in places, several places, lots of places, yes. And the rumour tends to be among people who’ve read this. There are some terrific love goddesses by the way. I’m particularly fond of Frigg, a Norse goddess of hearth and home. And I like the sound of Oya, a Nigerian love goddess whose whirlwind breath can reduce your home to rubble and blow your brains straight out of your skull as if she was blowing an egg. So I thought I could make them into nice fictional characters and give them a love story each with lots of bonnets and bosoms and a happy ending, possibly involving tight breeches and wet shirts and weddings and dreamy kisses and … Then I thought, nah. Who's going to buy shit like that ? Add Comment | View Comments Sunday, 18th March 2007 Usually Mother's Day means that one of my kids will kindly hold the door open for me while I stuff the washing in the machine. This year I have a card - one dog says to another, 'I had my own blog for a while, but I decided to go back to just pointless, incessant barking.' Erf erf. Add Comment | View Comments Friday, 16th March 2007 Help me, doctor, I'm suffering from amnesia and I've got to go to a very important quiz tonight! Doctor: Amnesia can be very serious, Mrs Furber, have you had it before? Me: Have I had what before? I'm suffering this morning from the after-effects of excessive knowledge, mostly other people's. Last night was terrific fun, and reasonably civilised until our quizmaster Marcus Berkman broke all rules and asked us who missed a penalty in the opening ceremony of the 1994 World Cup. How can a bunch of pencil squeezers know anything about football? It was playing straight into the hands of the lawyers' table (led by my husband) who seem to spend their whole time watching Sky Sports. Besides, my table was women only. (I do come from a sporty family actually; my brother broke his foot once throwing a ball ... he forgot it was chained to his ankle.) While most of us racked our brains about Pele and Maradonna, a member of one table went to the loo and was spotted on the way back leafing through Beckham's 'autobiography'. Which would have been a hanging offence if it had been any use to him. The answer - and you'll need to know this if you ever kidnapped by crazed hoodies who refuse to release you until you've provided the correct answer - is Diana Ross. Which shut us women up, didn't it? The question obviously wasn't about sport at all. It was about music. No, my table didn't win but with only four of us there (Alice, Kate, Jessie and me) we weren't too disappointed to come third after the Harpercollins table (who nearly beat my daughter's table in the uproarious laughter stakes too) and the geeks' team led by Justin Pollard who sets the questions with Stephen Fry for QI. Very many thanks to everybody who came and to Adam Hughes and the Borders staff for their excellent hospitality. Add Comment | View Comments Sunday, 4th March 2007 ‘I never think at all when I write,’ Don Marquis said, ‘nobody can do two things at the same time and do them both well.’ There's a chance to see if writers can think and drink at the same time in a READERS VS AUTHORS’ QUIZ at Borders, Oxford Street on Thursday 15 March starting at 7pm. Marcus Berkman will be quizmaster keeping us all in order and yes, wine will be available. The authors’ teams are: Tom Holland (Capt) Justin Pollard Lucy Hughes-Hallet Matthew Parker and Conn Iggulden one one table; Saul David (Capt) Simon Scarrow Christopher Fowler Paul Strathern David Dickinson and Adam Zamoyski on another table; and here's the real challenge ... Alice Hogge (Capt) Jessie Childs Anna Hervre Kate Williams Sophia McDougall and me on a third. If you’d like to come (and see how little I know) please contact or call into the shop for a ticket in advance, details from events manager Adam Hughes on 020 7292 1620 or ahughes@bordersstores.com Add Comment | View Comments Sunday, 4th March 2007 'Mummy, can I go out and watch the eclipse of the sun?' 'Of course you can, love, but don't stand too close.' Eclipses are central to my ghost novel What You See Is What You Get and last night's fantastic eclipse of the moon took me back to the solar eclipse of 1999, the first one in years where any of the UK had a chance of seeing totality. It was a cloudy day, one of those days when you’re not sure whether it’s going to rain now or later, and I was lucky to be in the Isles of Scilly, one of the very few places the sun came out at all. In Cornwall and Devon people had to make do with talking about cloud formations! You can read about it here . Add Comment | View Comments Thursday, 1st March 2007 You can go for days without a ridiculous crime cropping up, then several come along at once. Today’s pickings include an ASBO for a man selling lager from his ice-cream van outside a school in Wales, a chap who couldn’t be prosecuted for kerb-crawling in Dorset because he’d brought his bike, a Milan school teacher who nearly cut the tongue off a 7 year old pupil with scissors to shut him up (didn’t work, did it?) and a Mexican who’s in trouble for sexually harassing a rich woman 50 years his senior. ‘He said he couldn’t live without me, that he loved me,’ the 98 year old widow said wearily. A man is only as old as the woman he feels, and as healthy as her bank account. In a couple of months I’ll start to sift through the mountain of daft crimes on my desk so that Crombie Jardine can publish my definitive collection – You’re Nicked - in the autumn. Add Comment | View Comments Sunday, 25th February 2007 My daughter’s been finding her theology course at university more than human frame can stand, and who can blame her, so last week we went away to the seaside for some mum-on-one time. The situation is an opportunity of course, not a problem, and through our unshed tears we toasted the opportunity good and hard while discussing religion and writing and dark, dark thoughts. Are there any thoughts so dark, we wondered, that you can’t make fiction or humour out of them? (My daughter wants to be a stand-up comic and will be excellent, none better.) Write in black ink on one side of the page only, no cheating or conferring or breaking out in crippling shakes, you have precisely three hours starting now... Add Comment | View Comments Friday, 16th February 2007 Yesterday began at 1am with me being interviewed on Adelaide radio about daft court cases and finished in a Thai restaurant in Waterloo with Alison Weir, Justin Pollard and Kate Williams whose excellent biography of Emma Hamilton is coming out soon in paperback. In between, Elizabeth I was voted the greatest British Monarch, in Greenwich anyway, thanks to Sarah Gristwood’s charm and devilish advocacy. Alison Weir had been rooting for Henry VIII, and she swayed me. Justin (who also sets the questions for QI) spoke brilliantly for Alfred the Great and lost only, I feel, because of lack of salacious detail about Alfred’s private life. There must be something juicy you can tell us, Justin, about that ‘cipher’ wife. Why was she locked away? Was it because her cooking was even worse than Alfred’s? Or was it because she looked like (or worse, sounded like) the lovely Stephen Fry? Add Comment | View Comments Monday, 12th February 2007 Research – I love it! Some writers do research by picking their nails in the London Library all day. For my new novel I’ve just arranged to pick the brains of Karen Straw who plays the trumpet with two of her friends in a combo called Got The Horn? (It’s their question mark.) You can see their fabulous CV here – Karen’s the one almost dressed in red in the middle. She deputised in my brass band once years ago and pulled off that Brassed Off stunt even better than Tara Fitzgerald did in the film. Karen trotted in wearing spike heels and white jeans held up by a prayer. The guys all fluffed out their chests, waiting for disaster... The minute she began to play, jaws clanged to the floor at her brilliance. We won’t be able to get together until after her tour with Michael Bolton finishes at the Albert Hall in April. What am I writing at the minute? A twisted love story, darkly comic, with loads of music. As usual. Add Comment | View Comments Saturday, 10th February 2007 I’ve just booked myself on an Arvon Foundation course. I went on a playwriting one a couple of years ago which was so good that in the middle of the night some of us decided to cook up some real life drama of our own. We were in Ted Hughes’ old house in Yorkshire and with a bottle of red in each hand (that’s how I remember it anyway) a dozen of us headed off in the dark to toast Silvia's grave. Of course we couldn’t find it but we saluted her anyway, and then spent a merry couple of hours persuading a bipolar poet not to chuck himself in the river. The countryside can have that effect on people. Give me London every time where my average working week is less country mouse, more Jeeves unleashed in New York. (Like Jeeves, I adore the ladies’ roller derby. In fact I'm sure that’s me in the no 13 vest and perennially fashionable big pants.) But I can hardly wait for the course I've just booked. Arvon courses are always in beautiful places with terrific people and they've done me a power of good in the past. This time it’s novel writing. Never too late to learn more. Add Comment | View Comments Wednesday, 7th February 2007 I gave a talk to the Blackheath Wives last night. What could be nicer on a frosty evening than to chat with a group of clever, well informed women about books and writing? I’d asked what they wanted to hear about. My journey from being a mum to being a published writer was the answer, but for me there’s been no journey from one to another, the two things have always gone together. I tried to write fiction while I was a lawyer but it all came out like legal letters. It was my children who unlocked my storytelling and inspired WHAT YOU SEE IS WHAT YOU GET. Mothering doesn’t stop anyway. They’re all bigger than me now, but the washing machine’s still on every day, the hob rarely cools, life goes on … which is exactly how I like it because there’s plenty to write about. Add Comment | View Comments Wednesday, 7th February 2007 Some of the Blackheath Wives are shocked by my thriller The Most Intimate Place. I left samples of its opening chapters with them last night. Want to judge for yourself? Go to the Releases page of this site, click on the TMIP cover and you'll find the same sample there. Any complaints to rosemary@rosemaryfurber.com and I'll come round with a crash team and/or liquid revival techniques depending on the severity of the situation. Add Comment | View Comments Thursday, 25th January 2007 I had a thoroughly 21st century experience yesterday. My 21 year old goddaughter phoned me just before Christmas to say that she'd just had a boob job. She couldn’t lift her arms and wanted to hide under her duvet until the pain went away. I offered to buy her the most wonderful bra we could find as soon as she was well, which was yesterday. Agent P of course. My stomach heaved when she said that things haven’t quite knit yet and if she jumps up and down too fast the pads could shoot up inside the skin and give her shoulders like Joan Collins in Dynasty. I reminded her of the scene in Casino Royale when Bond’s girlfriend has drowned in the lift and he’s trying to revive her with CPR. Poor man, he searches for a bit of breast bone he can press without bursting her bags, makes a couple of pathetic jabs and … no, it’s hopeless, she’s got to die. Alice smiled; she’d much rather die than forego her new DDs. Later we had our make-up done in Selfridges, my way of subtly persuading her that men might still be interested in her lovely face. If only it were true. Add Comment | View Comments Monday, 22nd January 2007 Skegness is so homely it could only muster a couple of hoodies on Friday night and I swear they were sucking their thumbs. As I drove into Planet Butlins though, I felt as if I’d strayed onto the set of Night of the Living Dead with people mooching about, eyes rolling, arms outstretched in search of food that wasn't Burger King. I’d check in before I joined them. My band had teased me about the ‘Platignum’ chalet they’d booked for me because I said I didn’t want to share a room, could I please have a place of my own where I could be insomniac in peace. Besides, I’ve been on these jollies before and things can get messy. (And who, they ask, is one of the messiest? OK, OK, I confess.) Anyway, I checked in and shuffled off my find my 'standard' chalet, in the original 1960s section. I could smell the fag smoke from yards away. A couple of weeks ago fine, but I’m a non-smoker now. I am! I opened all the windows and a 5 degree wind cut through me. Shut them again. That’s when another bouquet hit me. More farmyard. Pungent. No top notes of gooseberries or pencil shavings, this one was all bottom notes being, not to put too fine a point on it, pee. I shut the loo door. It didn’t help. I shut the hall door. Same result. I lay down on the bed, poured myself a glass of the Chablis I’d brought for emergencies and switched on the Friday Night Project. Things could be worse, I thought. No, they couldn’t. The smell was rising from below me. Should I get all princessy and demand an upgrade? After the four hour drive, I hadn't the energy. Anyway, how would I look with my coat over my nightie, zombie-shuffling in my builders’ boots and most of the bottle of Chablis inside me? The staff could be forgiven for deciding that the root of the trouble was me. I slept on the floor. Which meant that in the morning I had the treat of boinging up and down on the bendy plastic shower tray, followed by a near-heart attack when the power-trickle came on and the icy shower curtain grabbed my legs like something from Pirates of the Caribbean, and I don't mean Johnny Depp. Luckily not all the rooms are like that. Another cornet player let me have a spare room in her sea-view, 'Silver' apartment for Saturday night (thank you, Lynda) and things improved enormously. What on earth was I doing there in the first place? I’m still not sure how it happened to a die-hard Led Zeppelin fan like me but I was playing my cornet in a brass band contest. (A Mineworkers’ contest, no less. I do have some mineworker’s credentials actually: my first marriage was to a miner’s son and I’ve been down one of the Kent pits while it was still active.) So, apart from Nightmare in Piddle Close and the band coming next to last in our section, the weekend was fantastic. Add Comment | View Comments Friday, 19th January 2007 With one bound she was free! I’ve had enough of the domestic graces for a while and will be spending the weekend in Butlins at Skegness. Why on earth would I want to go where the house red is ketchup? I’ll tell you when I get back… Add Comment | View Comments Tuesday, 16th January 2007 I’m at a very early stage of a new novel and it’s a bit like trying to catch a horse in a field. It's there in the distance but if I march up too fast, it runs away and hides. I have to keep sidling up and hope it’ll let me lay a hand on its neck for a second and get a clear look before it’s off again into the mist. Today it feels as if I’ll never catch it. In fact it feels that if I even get to clap eyes on the bugger, it will probably look like this. Add Comment | View Comments Friday, 12th January 2007 I’m surrounded by clean livers. They’ve given up alcohol, these clean livers, so they can boast about their clean livers, and they do. So pious. Personally I never mention that I haven’t had a cigarette for a whole century (since 3am on 6 January 2007.) That's when I found my youngest sucking on a roll-up as if he’d smoked 40 Gitanes a day since the age of 2, which he hasn’t, I swear. Not that I know of anyway. So I’m bound to set an example. But drink, now that’s another story. Add Comment | View Comments Wednesday, 3rd January 2007 You know you’ve had a belter of a New Year’s Eve when you need the plumber to help you clear up. I had a two-party approach to New Year’s Eve. In fact, being a lib dem I fitted in 3 parties, and made the mistake of leaving a member of my family in the company of my father and some 50% proof Ardbeg whisky. In a moment of exuberance someone sat on the bath taps and nearly detached them from the wall. A bottle of classy red to Vogueress who has correctly identified the culprit as my darling husband who remembers nothing of that evening from about 10pm. Add Comment | View Comments Wednesday, 27th December 2006 Christmas might be about love and Jesus to some people; for me, it’s about cooking. On Christmas Day my husband and I were a brilliant team: he plucked and stuffed the turkey, so all I had to do was kill it and shove it in the oven. Now I’m up to my elbows in running the Furber Greasy Spoon, all night breakfasts a speciality with the finest runny eggs and crispy chips in the hemisphere. My kids found this and swear that Stephen Fry's doing a perfect impression of me in the kitchen. I’m flattered. I didn’t think my language was that restrained. Add Comment | View Comments Sunday, 24th December 2006 Children can be so cruel. I’ve been reminded that my Santa skills weren’t always all that. It’s not just that I’d wake them up with my stumbling and swearing as I tiptoed into their bedrooms. One Christmas Eve I forgot about doing Santa completely. (Don’t ask me why. How would I remember that sort of thing?) What I do remember is three angry children waking me on Christmas morning going ‘Mummy, what have you done with our presents?’ Well, they’ve got to have something to tell their therapists. Wouldn’t be normal otherwise. Happy Christmas. Add Comment | View Comments Wednesday, 20th December 2006 Christmas. The only solution is to chainwatch Bad Santa alone in an off-licence locked from the inside. But would Santa find me there? I’ve come through all three stages of Santa: first I believed in Santa, then I didn’t believe, then I got to be Santa myself, usually plastered at four in the morning. Now my kids are far more grown up than I am and nobody wants to know. They want 10lb boxes of money and no trimmings, which is sad. I know which off-licence I’d hole up in: Theatre of Wine in Greenwich. I was there at the weekend looking for Belgian beers and as soon as I came through the door, somebody said ‘Must be time to open another bottle’. Corks were popping and happy people were quaffing away. That’s the true spirit of Christmas if you ask me: hospitality combined with a magnificent selection of drink. Cheers, everybody! Have a good one. Add Comment | View Comments Monday, 11th December 2006 Bishop Tom! You deserve to have UPI (Hons) after your name in honour of the Unidentified Pissed Injuries you picked up with excellence and style this weekend after a party (‘just a few ales, officer’) at the Irish Embassy. Did nobody warn you that the most lethal thing about the Irish is the hospitality? You won my admiration years ago as a patron of Spires and you can drink with me any time. To hell with the warning on the bottle that drinking with the Irish can seriously damage your (delete as appropriate) teeth/ sex life/ wallet/ hopes of promotion to God/ chances of finding your car in the dark ever again. Add Comment | View Comments Thursday, 7th December 2006 It was the AP Watt authors’ party last night and what fantastic hosts they were. But I’ve made a shattering discovery. Writers are miserable sods. Anybody propping up the wall refusing to take his or her lips off the glass long enough for conversation was a writer and the longer they’d been writing, the more miserable they were! Having come through a week of severe bruising to the heart, I could have posed as a Booker winner but fortunately I met the marvellous Salena Godden whose memoir’s being published by Harpercollins next year. Salena hauled a bunch of us off to the Colony Club where she found some even more miserable writers and forced everybody to cheer the fuck up. Dorothy Parker said ‘the writer’s way is rough and lonely, and who would choose it while there are vacancies in more gracious professions such as, say, cleaning out ferryboats?’ Or being bar staff at the Colony Club. Here’s to happy writers! I must give up smoking again zzzzzzzzz Add Comment | View Comments Monday, 4th December 2006 You’ve read the book, got the t-shirt, drunk yourself to oblivion on the specially commissioned monkish beer – now you can have fun with the website. http://www.whatyouseeiswhatyouget.biz is live and dangerous for anybody over 12 who’s interested in ghosts, skateboarding, love spells, computers and … did I mention ghosts? (My ghost novel What You See Is What You Get seems to be too terrifying for the under 12s – they’ve run to mummy by page 17.) There’s a quiz, games and a SPOOK! page where you’ll find a new story set in Chislehurst Caves. The site’s called .biz after my magnificent daughter who not only inspired the character Rox but has been my loving critic and support through the umpteen rejections and redrafts. You’re a star, Biz, I love you. Add Comment | View Comments Thursday, 30th November 2006 Jury service finito so I’m back to the grindstone, or as close as we pencil squeezers get to one. Because - confession time here - when writing’s going well it is the best fun you can have with your clothes on. Add Comment | View Comments Wednesday, 22nd November 2006 My novel has to go on the back burner this week: I'm on jury service. So far it's been fun actually. The jurors' room has been like an alcohol-free drinks party with us lolling about swapping life stories and our worst experiences of being stuck in Bluewater with our other halves. But today the serious stuff began. The worst fear is of course that as we walk back out to the car park, some burly friends of the defendant will want to have a word with us, and it won't be about wandering into the wrong changing room in Gap. Would be tempting (though illegal) to resort to a traditional defence ... Judge: 'Why on earth do you want to acquit this scoundrel?' Jury Foreman: 'Insanity, my lord.' Judge: 'What, all twelve of you?' Add Comment | View Comments Tuesday, 21st November 2006 Waterstone's in Bluewater have just ordered loads of copies of I Sue You. Yay! Add Comment | View Comments Tuesday, 14th November 2006 A really spooky thing happened on Brancaster beach. I was walking along enjoying being the only person there (Ted Hughes got the sensation exactly right in Black Coat in Birthday Letters) and the sky was getting heavy when I spotted two people in the distance heading towards the wreck. You can’t actually get to the wreck – there’s a deep, fast channel in the way – but lots of people try. I kept close to the dunes and had been watching squadrons of geese heading east when I realised the horizon was blurring and it was getting seriously dark. Time to go back. A drink would be good, hot whiskey or a large glass of red. The golf club looked inviting with its orange lights, but I’m not a member so it wasn’t inviting me. It occurred to me that I hadn’t seen that couple come back from the wreck. Nobody had come past me. I heard razor shells crunch as if somebody pretty big was just behind me. I turned. Nobody was there. I had a good look along the whole horizon for the couple walking to the wreck but I couldn’t see them anywhere. He could be doing anything to her, I thought, or she to him. What was I to do? Nothing heroic, I’m afraid, I made for the pub. It took several large ones for the hairs on my neck to lie down again and for that crunching sound to stop replaying in my memory. I still don't know what that was. Next day I looked for news about a couple lost on the beach but there was no suicide pact. No crime of passion. No vengeance after decades of abuse. Maybe I hadn’t seen a couple in the distance after all. Maybe it was time I got back to the sanity of some company other than my own. Add Comment | View Comments Sunday, 12th November 2006 I’m recovering from a week on my own in Norfolk jumpstarting my next novel. Nothing much happens in Norfolk. So much nothing that one night I was hanging out of a bedroom window bashing the sand off my boots when I noticed the old couple opposite watching me from behind their frosted glass front door. A bit later I was sitting with my feet out the window wiping off damp sand and mud with my socks when I saw them looking at me from another room with the curtains round their heads, the way you do when you’re trying to pretend you’re not there. I gave them a cheery wave with my wet sock. One mustn’t disappoint one’s public. Add Comment | View Comments Thursday, 2nd November 2006 I have the best friends in the world. Last night David turned up and made me sign a copy of I Sue You. A friend of his had bought it in Canary Wharf's Books Etc after he'd seen David laughing out loud at it. The perfect end to a difficult day. Today's got particularly rich pickings for You're Nicked, my book of stupid crimes/criminals (published next year). A prisoner smuggled an orange prison jumpsuit out of a New York prison and took it into his head to go trick or treating wearing it. Imagine stealing a briefcase from a car and instead of finding a laptop, phone, blackberry etc inside, you find it's full of sex toys. An Israeli 'sexologist' has been robbed of £1000 worth of stuff she says she needed for her TV sex programme. Hmmm. And in Tokyo a robber had a meal in a noodle bar, produced a knife and demanded all the takings. He rolled off a 1000 yen bill and paid for his meal before he left, including waiting for 100 yen change before he legged it. Add Comment | View Comments Thursday, 26th October 2006 One of my friends Paul Matcham was actually involved in one of the cases in I Sue You! It's Jarvis v Swan Tours on page 115 and it's one of my favourites. I remember my university supervisor Tony Weir bobbing up and down on his chair in rage that such a trivial case (not to Mr Jarvis of course) could have got to the Court of Appeal. Paul, who must have been an infant articled clerk at the time, tells me that he interviewed everyone who went on the tour and apart from Mr Jarvis, they all thought it was the best holiday they'd ever had. However, the last week of their holiday was Mr Jarvis's first and he spent his second week alone. Only Mr Jarvis was called to give evidence. And the yodeller was pissed! I suspect Mr Jarvis' mistake was not to be. The Skegness Prize for the first person finding a legal mistake in I Sue You is still unclaimed, by the way. Come on, guys, you're not trying hard enough... Add Comment | View Comments Friday, 13th October 2006 I woke at 6.30 this morning with a perfectly clear head. This is alarming because last night we launched I Sue You, my collection of idiotic court cases. The hangover will kick in soon, I'm sure. The staff at Greenwich Waterstone's were, as always, absolutely wonderful. I can't thank them all enough, though I'll try and find a way. My fanfare was awesome, as promised. The guests bought stacks of books and cheerfully put away more than five cases of wine. Heroic work. I read law at university and used to be a City solicitor but last night's launch of I Sue You was definitely the apex of my legal career. There were loads of lawyers there, and they were a terrifying crew all scouring the book for errors. So I've offered a prize to the first person to find a legal mistake in a bought copy. The prize is an application of the Skegness Principle. You know the one: first prize one week in Skegness, second prize two weeks in Skegness? So the Skegness prize for finding a legal mistake in I Sue You will be a second copy of I Sue You! No takers yet... Huge thanks to everybody who turned up last night, to the Waterstone's staff, to my trumpeters Alex Cromwell and Matthew Down, and to Alex Caldon who composed the fanfare. Special thanks to my brother Pete who came a long way to be there. I can feel the first knockings of hangover now so I'll just lay my forehead on this nice warm keyboard for a bit zzzzzzzzzzzz Add Comment | View Comments Thursday, 5th October 2006 I've written several theatre and radio scripts over the years and only one of them ever came to anything: about two years ago a short comedy was on radio 3. I'm amazed to report I've just had an expression of interest in another of them, a much darker piece about a mother's search for her 15 year old daughter who's kidnapped by a drug dealer. Add Comment | View Comments Monday, 18th September 2006 I've just received contracts for You're Nicked, my criminal 'sequel' to I Sue You. The publisher wants the text by next June. I'll have no problem finding material. I've started collecting from newspapers already and barely a day goes by without another idiot jostling to qualify. I've just seen in The Week that a man in Chicago's been charged with disorderly conduct: he and his mother were trying to board a flight to Turkey when customs officials pulled something suspicious out of his hand luggage and asked what it was. He was too embarrassed to admit in front of his mum that it was part of his penis pump, and said: 'It's a bomb.' Add Comment | View Comments Friday, 15th September 2006 The Most Intimate Place has just had an offer from a really good publisher for 2008, Maia Press. I'm thrilled. It took me at least six years to find a publisher for WYSIWYG. I suspect that by 2008 abusive religion might still be topical. Add Comment | View Comments Wednesday, 13th September 2006 Yesterday a woman told me in the street that she'd read What You See Is What You Get while she was away on holiday and 'loved it'. In one of Sylvia Plath's poems she compares (I think it's) her new baby with 'found money'. For me, an encounter like that is better than found money. Add Comment | View Comments |