Put your lights on

In a story absolutely nothing to do with Carlos Santana’s song, which as a sign of aging I still think is quite new even though it came out in 1999, according to the BBC the Energy Secretary Ed Davey has defended the building of a new nuclear power station at Hinckley Point as “a very good deal for Britain.” In twenty years of providing research-based consultancy I’ve come to detest facts being used to spin a story that they contradict, not least because when the person doing it is found out the first thing he does is blame the people who provided them. I’ve seen whole company boards of directors literally screaming across a table at each other when that happens. It doesn’t generally go in the book of best management practice. But then, incidents like that are supposed to magically unhappen in most management books I’ve ever read.

I don’t know whether nuclear power is better or worse than windmills or tidal barrages or lots of people on stationary bicycles converted into dynamos. But the number of flat contradictions in the story makes me think someone isn’t so much being what the last Tory government chose to call being economical with the actuality, as flat lying.

“A good deal for Britain” now means giving an eye-watering amount of money to EDF, the French company which will be building and operating the power station, along with a Chinese company. In both France and China these companies are effectively nationalised, so now a good deal for Britain directly means that UK tax payers’ money is given directly to foreign governments and this is officially Good. This isn’t me being a bit political, as Ben Elton used to say. There isn’t another way of looking at this. The money couldn’t, for example, be given to the British government’s power companies because they were sold off cheap (just like the Royal Mail, whose shares have jumped 50% in the first week since the launch).

The government estimates that energy bills will be £77 lower by 2030, but Mr Davey could not guarantee this because of the “uncertainties”.

In other words, Mr Davey, who as a Cabinet Minister is one of the most senior members of ‘the government’ has said that what was said isn’t necessarily true.

Greenpeace pointed out helpfully that the official story is that power prices are going to be locked for 35 years. But as David Cameron, the Prime Minister said last week, he couldn’t stop power prices rising this winter. There is no magical thing that makes this winter (the one where prices cannot be controlled) different from the one half a lifetime away where apparently they can.

Even normally shy and retiring Ed Milliband had to comment on the fact that his Right Honourable Friend said he couldn’t do anything at all about consumer prices now, but could definitely fix the price the government was going to pay for power in 35 years.

Mr Davey plans to submit the application for state aid clearance to the EC.

Let’s look at that for a second. You might think the dead hand of the European Union shouldn’t get involved with the workings of a sovereign government. You might also wonder why the UK government is in the business of giving state aid to foreign companies, especially when they are owned by foreign governments. Clearly it’s not enough that we exported the production of the stuff that fills pound shops to China; now we have to give state aid to their government as well.

Angela Knight, chief executive of trade body Energy UK, said

“We’ve got 10 years in which to insulate our homes better. We’ve got 10 years to take the steps that some other countries have taken – especially those in colder countries – to make sure that we can keep warm but use less.”

Some other countries have a private rented housing market, where energy inefficient homes are harder to find occupants for. Some other countries actually build houses, modern, energy efficient, insulated houses, rather than allowing ‘the market’ to dictate that fewer new homes were built last year than in any year in the previous ninety. That’s right. in 1924 more homes were built than in 2012. The market doesn’t want new homes. If there were new homes then the rubbishy inefficient heat-leaking old ones we have wouldn’t sell for as much. Who on earth wants that?

Still, what do I know? Someone who probably knows a little bit more about stuff than me is Dr Paul Dorfman, from the Energy Institute at University College London, who said “what it equates to actually is a subsidy and the coalition said they would never subsidise nuclear”.

He added: “It is essentially a subsidy of between what we calculate to be £800m to £1bn a year that the UK taxpayer and energy consumer will be putting into the deep pockets of Chinese and French corporations, which are essentially their governments.”

Where do you even start with this?

So just to sum up, officially we don’t have any money and we can’t interfere in the market because not only is the market always right (except if it looks like the Royal Mail was deliberately and fraudulently undervalued, robbing the taxpayer, in which case it’s just a fluke and hardly worth mentioning) but interfering with the market means your Mum fancied Stalin. At exactly the same time we have £800 million a year to give to the French and Chinese governments in state aid so transparent that we have to ask the EC really nicely if it’s ok that we give it to them. Oh and the teeny little lie about never subsidising nuclear power, obviously.

Appropriately enough, way back in the 1980s there was a TV series called Edge of Darkness (not to be confused with Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, a searing insight into the 1970s power cuts and the Three Day Week, or Bruce Springsteen’s Darkness On The Edge of Town, a song protesting intermittent rural New Jersey power supplies), the hero’s daughter got herself shot protesting about nuclear energy, setting her father off on a quest to find out who was lying about what. Along the way he met a CIA man who saw the light, spitting out ‘Nuclear energy – they threw truth out the window the day they invented that stuff.’

Something to do with copyright and You Tube which I don’t pretend to understand is stopping me being able to bring you Put Your Lights On with sound. So I’ll just type the words and you can hum them.

There’s a monster living under my bed
Whispering in my ear
There’s an angel with a hand on my head
She says I got nothing to fear

We all shine like stars, then we fade away.

I used to believe that grown-ups mostly told the truth and tried to help. Then I grew up too.

First storm of winter

The first storm of the winter came in today as I was driving back along the A14. I could feel the car shaking as the wind took it, saw the trees waving through the windscreen. By the time I got close to the village where I live the road that always floods was under six inches of water, but the high road was flooded too, the water lying where I’ve never seen water on the road in the six years of being here.

clouds2

It’s been a raw wind all day, a damp chill that cuts through summer clothes and let’s you know you’re in for the long haul now. The radio was saying there’s a good chance the lights will go out this winter, because government after government has decided that having wars is much more fun than building power stations. Let’s face it, nobody is going to move out of your way at the G8 Summit just because everyone in your own country thinks things are going quite nicely for a change. That’s not what being a global statesman is about at all.

Someone had left my gate open and a dog fox was calling as I stepped out of the car into the dark and moved my bags indoors. There was a spicy bean stew in the freezer and a bottle of wine in the rack. Put the washing into the machine and unpack the bags, make the list of Stuff To Do and read three really, really nice emails from people who didn’t owe me a nice email but sent one anyway.

There’s food on the table and a bed waiting for me. And some days you count your blessings for those things alone, because there are plenty of people without and more to come. Tomorrow if the weather is ok I’ll cycle down to Caroline Wiseman’s Suffolk Arts Club at lunchtime. There’s always someone interesting to talk to there as well as a glass of wine.

None of us know what’s going to happen next, not anybody at all. I think the secret is wanting to find out.

Getting it right

So I just finished my fourth show, the Monday noon Lifeboat Party slot at www.readiocastle.com.

So far I thought the third was the best, with someone saying to me ‘you sounded like a real DJ!’ which flattered me hugely. This time I had no guests at all though, everyone had blown me out and I forgot my Kid Creole Lifeboat Party CD for the signature track.

I thought the whole thing was a total disaster, his fourth show. I just wasn’t in a great mood, bad weekend and chaotic. I couldn’t hear through the headphones, I couldn’t remember which CDs I’d loaded into the decks, the iPod feed was about half the volume of anything else and I couldn’t hear anything from the iPod at all, so I didn’t even know if it was playing or not.

So I talked about BT’s broadband to Rachmaninov’s Second (Rach 2, as we call it down the station, darling) and that seemed to go a lot better than I had any right to expect it to, unrehearsed. Then I played Magazine’s Permafrost and totally, I swear, totally forgot about the line that runs I will drug you and oh look at that out of the window. Except there wasn’t a window in my studio.

Got home. Thought I’d blown it. Got email. One word: “Brilliant.”

It made my day.

England’s green

Blake's painting. He wasn't right, was he? — Blake’s painting. He wasn’t right, was he?

I cycled about nine miles to a friend’s farm. We were going to discuss the business plan I’m writing for her, changing her experimental pastoral herd to one that can sustain a modest living for more than just the cows.

It was a sunny, late June evening and the back-from work rush-hour was starting in Butley. There must have been four cars altogether, two behind me and two coming towards me, one of them waiting to turn into the side-road on my left.

It was a little red car, about 15 years old judging by the P-lettered plate. The woman driving it was in her late twenties, a bit tanned, wearing shades with her hair in a top-knot. All the car windows were down and there was music blasting out. I didn’t recognise it at first. You don’t normally hear anything in Butley. When the Butley Oyster was open there used to be old photos on the wall, memories of a time when things ever happened in this tiny, usually silent village.

The pub used to be confused with the Oysterage at Orford, famous for its food and the way when people from London phoned to try to book a table, the landlady, who never, ever served food, thought it was terribly clever and amusing to pretend she’d never heard of the Oysterage and that she had no idea what anyone was talking about. That’s a real old country thing, the satisfaction of saying ‘they couldn’t trick me’ while what they actually did was gave their money to someone else. Odd that the pub is shut now. But like most of Suffolk, despite what the more moronic inhabitants like to pretend, it hasn’t always been like this at all. The photos on the wall of the pub proved it. All of them in black and white, faded with time. One of them showed a crashed Heinkel in a field, a wrecked German bomber surrounded by British policemen, civilians and a man in un buttoned RAF tunic, holding a machine-gun from the aircraft at waist-level, pretending to be Jimmy Cagney over 70 years ago. Oh the fun you can have when you’re young with a uniform and a gun.

Home Guard

The other photo I always noticed was from the same period, when Suffolk expected to be the front line and over-run. Especially this part of Suffolk, just a few miles from Shingle Street. This whole area was off-limits to civilians for most of the war. Whole villages were simply confiscated and everyone told to leave for the duration. Iken was one, where thousands of Allied troops charged up the beaches of the Alde in practice for Normandy. Shingle Street, just a few miles away, was another and to this day, no-one really knows what happened there, nor whether or not there really was a German landing that resulted in hundreds of burned bodies being washed up along the shoreline. The photo showed the local Home Guard unit, the men too old or too young or too infirm for active service, kitted out in their uncomfortable-looking serge uniforms and re-cycled WW1 Lee-Enfield rifles, leftovers from the War to end all Wars. There are lots of sad things about old photos, not least the fact that in any photo seventy years old, its likely that most of the people in the photo are dead. But there was always another sadness about this photo of the halt and the lame. The Home Guard were by definition, the men who didn’t join the regular Army. The sad thing was the number of them in the photo, more old and young, more men unfit for active service than live in the whole village today.

Suffolk more than many rural places has changed more than most. Without any motorways and a farcical, un-commutable railway service that means the 97 mile journey to London takes around two and a half hours, once the farms mechanised there simply wasn’t anything for anyone to do. The farms weren’t the bulwark of society some people still like to pretend. They got rid of the horses, then they rid of the men who worked for them. That got rid of the whole point of most of these villages. The people drifted away, apart from the ones too old to do anything except hang on in a half-life of no work and no-one under 50 until the very end.

The music was still hammering out of the little red car when I recognised what it was the girl with the top-knot and the shades was listening to, a choral version of Jerusalem. One of the weirdest artists and poets who ever lived wrote it, living in the middle of London. I used to walk past where his house had been most days, just round the corner from where Karl Marx lived in a two-room flat writing so passionately about the exploitation of the proletariat that he got his maid pregnant. The song became the anthem of the Labour Party long before Blair re-branded it Tory-Lite (‘I’m Bombin ’ It’™). But it used to mean something, Blake’s Albion, the Labour-landslide 1945 generation’s self-reward for its blood sacrifice twice in what was so obviously not then an average lifetime.

We will not sleep till we have built Jerusalem in England’s green and pleasant land.

Blake must always have sat uncomfortably with the buttoned-up church folk. Like Dickens, he only once saw a ghost and then one no-one else saw or had ever heard of. He and his wife once sunbathed naked at a time when most decent people didn’t even take their clothes off to wash once a week. And the paintings, the poems about tigers, the rays of sun, the tablets of stone, the amazement and the wonder that radiates from everything this strange man painted and wrote, the power of the imagery and the dark undertow beneath dull little rhymes about diseased roses and flying worms. All of this, belting out of an old Nissan in a country lane one Friday teatime in England’s green and pleasant land.

This was Ben and Claire’s England, Peter and Liz and Teresa’s England in Not Your Heart Away. The magic is still there and like all real magic, it hides. You only find it when you least expect it. But it’s always there, waiting until you can see it again.

On the radio

Well, that was the second Lifeboat Party show at www.radiocastle.com I did on Monday. The general consensus is still camp, but slicker.

You can listen to it again wherever you are in the world by just clicking here and judge for yourselves. I got my very most favourite fan laughing even though I didn’t get the thing in about the Suffolk Space Programme.

That aluminium silo on that farm outside Wickham Market? Oh come on!! You didn’t think that was farm stuff did you? It’s for an ICBM the Americans left when they abandoned Bentwaters airbase in 1992. We’ve used it to put farmers into space out here for the last 15 years, after we worked out how to turn the methane in battery chicken poo into rocket fuel. Townies. They don’t know nuffin…

No Batteries Required

Back in November I was sitting in a cosy pub with a man called The Sausage King.

Ooo no missus, don’t, as Frankie Howerd would have said.

He runs a radio show called The Foodie Fix on Radio Castle. Not Frankie Howerd, obviously. Try to keep up. Towards the end of the second pint at The Crown I did one of the stupid things I do; came up with a brilliant, compelling, original idea that I then have to turn into a brilliant, compelling, original actual thing, which is usually a bit more difficult than sitting having a pint and a smart mouth.

So, wouldn’t it be really funny if this bankrupt chicken farmer – I worked on a chicken farm when I was 14 you know. All my clothes smelled. I even put a reference to it in Not Your Heart Away. Did I tell you about that? It’s brilliant. Getting some really nice reviews. Anyway – who blames Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall for the EU battery cage ban that came in on January 1st 2012. Only for laying hens. You can keep broilers for food in them, no problems.

Obviously we can’t call him Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall but he’s got to be the same, fearfully earnest, heart in the right place and no clue how or why the chicken farmer should be so murderously furious with him. Because what the chicken farmer wants to do is make Hugh recant, live on air on his TV show. Then kill him ditto.

Swing, swing together

But it’s not as simple as that, given that in this egalitarian age where Old Etonians piously proclaim equality of opportunity most of the Cabinet and media are in one way or another related to each other by not very many separations at all (Cameron was at school with Bojo and Hugh, Kirsty’s cousin is Cath Kidston, Kirsty clawed her way up through the Christie’s stockroom where her father only coincidentally happened to be the chairman and she really was rumoured to be in line for a place in the Cabinet before the election (word on the street was she turned it down, you hear what I’m sayin’?), as Huggy Bear used to put it).

So Cameron is a bit sensitive ( like rarely, who knew?) about this out-of touch thing people keep saying, so he’s going to get loads of ordinary people in the Cabinet. People like Kirsty, who makes things and talks about houses, so she can have Housing. Clarkson, who practically lives next door, who can have Transport, or if Bernie Ecclestone wants that instead then Clarkson will just have to be Foreign Minister with an open remit. And Hugh, well, Hugh can be head of the Ministry of Food.

Cameron jumps in his ordinary chauffeur-driven police-escorted limo and sets off down the M3, just like anybody else. And arrives just in time to be held hostage by the bankrupt chicken farmer.

Brilliant, eh? Maybe another pint.

Coming soon

So than I had to write it. I got the first scene of the five down and got totally stuck for three months. I couldn’t finish it until one day when the rest just flowed out. I got the other four down in two days. It runs just on the half-hour, deliberately. Not many sound-effects, not too many voices at the same time.

And it seems, on RadioCastle soon. I’ll tell you when it’s on. So far my actress casting sessions don’t seem to be as well attended as I’d hoped. I bumped into Clive Merrison the other night who I sort-of know, going into a different pub, but somehow he hasn’t taken me up on the offer of either the Prime Minister or Pew Farley-Totherstall. Odd.

Planned to fail

Odd Week

It’s been a strange week for my front door. I’m trying to sell my house. Apart from the front door it’s great, but apparently the front door has been cursed by a disgruntled passing gypsy or something.

I mowed the lawn last weekend. I’d almost finished when the mower started making a weird clattering gasping noise and pouring smoke like the Piper Alpha rig. Yes, I really AM that old. With split-second recall that had been oddly absent for the previous half decade I realised I hadn’t actually put any oil in it for the past five years.

Blow Up

I switched it off before it blew itself up. I thought I’d let it cool down for a half hour, find some oil in the shed. Trailer then. Car boot. Other shed. By that time about half an hour was up anyway. All this stuff takes longer than you think it’s going to. I put the oil in and pulled the string to start it and magically, it did without any clattering or detonations other than the 2,000 ones per minute it’s supposed to do. Result. But I had the feeling something was wrong. I couldn’t work out what it was until I went out that evening and found my front door in bits. Before I bought this house someone had replaced the front door with a UPVC one, that actually fits the doorway and keeps the draught out. Except being made like most modern things from plastic, snot and the tears of Chinese child labourers that’s about all it does now after however long it is since 1989.

First the letterbox fell off. It’s aluminium. Aluminium corrodes in rainwater, so it’s an especially stupid choice for anything you’re going to leave outside, where letterboxes are supposed to live. That wasn’t the problem if you don’t look at the letterbox flap. The plastic studs holding it onto the door had sheared off. I apologise for the technical, manly use of the word ‘sheared.’

It’s a guy thing

The plastic had broken because plastic degrades in ultra-violet light, the kind you get from sun-beds and inconveniently for people living on the third rock out from it in this solar system, the sun. In other words, put this door where it was designed to go and in less than a quarter century it will fall to bits. Brilliant. Superb. If you make replacement door bits. But hardly anyone does. The company that made the rubbish bolted onto this door went bust years ago, or more likely the owner sold it to China and went to live in Spain where he could complain about England being full of foreigners in more comfort.

My very oldest friend lives in Thomas Hardy’s sister’s schoolhouse in rural Dorset. Well, she doesn’t because it’s full of dry rot but that was nothing to do with the front door. The school house was built around about 1870, I’d guess, when education was made compulsory in England and Wales. Long before Anthony Crossland decided that the way to keep Old Etonians out of government was to deny the concept of academic achievement in the state system. Yes, that one really worked. Long before the idea that everyone should pay for everyone to learn to read was denounced as pretty close to Communism. A lot of changes have happened since that front door was put on. But it’s all still there. The letterbox hasn’t fallen off. The lock hasn’t come off in anyone’s hand, which was the next thing to happen.

Two screws went all the way through the handle, then the plastic one side of the door, through the lock and into the plastic and then the handle the other side, top and bottom. This isn’t too technical, is it? Both screws are the same. 4mm across, 7cm long. Except one of them is now 5cm long, because the end has broken off. Because it’s aluminium.

Can you buy 4mm screws anywhere? No, of course you can’t. We got fives, mate. Dunno where you’ll get fours. So I have to buy a new lock. The whole thing. Backplate, faceplate, two handles, the lock and two screws, because someone wanted to cut their production costs and use rubbish inappropriate materials to maximise their profit in the first place. The glory of consumerism. Use crap. Pass the cost to someone else. Buy more, buy more, buy more. Except it’s almost always just crap you’re buying.

With what I had thought was going to be its dying breath the mower managed to spit a tiny piece of gravel off the lawn and through the front door window. It left a tiny hole not even the size of the nail on the finger of a small child. And the whole glass panel crazed and cracked like a road safety advert. I liked it. Everyone who saw it liked it, but it was obviously building up confidence to fall out on the path and potentially onto whoever was opening the door at the time, so I had to get a new window as well. The mower spat the gravel because the gravel was there, but the reason it flew through the air when and where it did was because the bit of the mower that was supposed to stop things like that happening had rusted through. Because it was made of crap metal. Because it was made in China. Because it was like everything else now, just called ‘quality,’ just called ‘added value.’

I am stopping doing this. Not writing this, although maybe this morning I should and go and fix the mower. Buying crap. That’s something I need to stop. I don’t want to support this cycle any more. So I’m not buying a new mower. I’m not even going to buy a second-hand mower. Instead I’m taking the power back, taking responsibility. I’m going to fix the old one, with fibreglass. No, I haven’t done it before. I can learn. Anyone can. We can all do this stuff, not if we start believing but when we stop believing we can’t and we should buy it, the same way we’ve been told for the past 30 years.

The door lock is going to be a longer problem.

Liz speaks

This is the review from the person whose voice I stole for Liz’s character:

Now that I have worked out the title of Not Your Not_Your_Heart_Away_Cover_for_Kindle Heart Away is taken from the wonderous A E Housman, I like this even more, except for the first bit which didn’t float my boat any more than it did Mr Bennett’s. And the end bit, which could do with tweaking. But the rest of it is really rather far out (as I am sure that Ben and Liz would have said in late 1970s, although probably not the posher Claire).

In so far as the writing is concerned, the style is journalistic and leaning towards being impressively taut; there’s a sort of “dashed off” Fitzgerald / Capote / Hemingway thing going on which makes you want to keep on reading notwithstanding your aggravation with one or two of the characters and the rather mesmeric plotlessness; all so resonant of late teenage years. As other reviewers have said, reading this book took you back to 1978, when so many 18 year olds lived lives dramatically different from their parents; when sixth formers had dreams and vagueish plans rather than A*s, focus and resumes, when you were allowed to drink illegally in pubs on the basis that the landlord kicked you out if you couldn’t at least pretend to be grownup.

Mesmeric Plotlessness

And what an insight into the mind of a boy / man – able to care about the rather uninspiring girlfriend who provided sex and wanted an engagement ring, whilst lusting after various others just because they were there and all the time being romantically obsessed with the vacuous posh totty. Which brings me to another Fitzgerald similarity – the way in which Claire drifts around carelessly in the manner of Daisy in Great Gatsby, oblivious to harm she causes; not least to the narrator by taking his heart away.

Loved the Salisbury Plain bits – anyone who was brought up in Wiltshire will confirm the night driving and Cradle Hill watching are truly evocative. And Peter was a beautifully drawn cameo role. Liz was absolutely fabulous and what a shame Ben didn’t listen to her sound advice – but what boys ever do listen to their good girl friends when dreamy posh girls are drifting by?
This book has a definite filmic quality – get the script written, Mr Bennett! And for the next book follow Ben on his adventures wherein a 1970s teenage boy becomes a man ………………..I just hope he keeps his fancies free from entanglements with vague, dim posh girlies, although somehow I rather suspect not.

WTF

I was hunting the job ads, like you do, when I saw this:

Paid Role For Creative Writer

Seeking up and coming creative writer to become a part of the film project.

We have a very exciting script and are in current talks with a Funding Firm in London with keen interest.

The creative writer should be able to come on board and help furnish the script to the macro excellence we are looking for. The ideal candidate should be expected to write in the cutting edgy genre.

The Treatment and character development have already been completed, so what we require is
someone to help flesh the script out. The project is still in the planning stage.

What are you waiting for? Send your CV and a sample script (no more than 5 pages) to the email below.

The Creative Writer will be working alongside the original creative writer and director of the film.

THIS IS A PAID ROLE

Where to start?

Up and coming? Well, I can give it a go, but let’s look at the property first. You haven’t got a screenplay, you’ve got a synopsis and the characters. In other words, all you’ve got is some ideas for people you saw in the street and what you think they might do if they were trapped in a New York lift with a chemical weapon and a string vest. Nobody’s bought an option on the film or you’d have funding. So far, so what? That’s why you want a writer. Then you might have a screenplay.

Macro excellence

What worries me is what language it’s supposed to be written in. I don’t know if I can write macro excellence. Because I don’t know what it means. Nobody walks down the street saying things like that because even the bloke selling the Big Issue would laugh at them. “Come back to my place, baby. I think I can promise you some….( drop voice an octave and do not rush this bit) ....macro excellence.” Can you see it? You’d be the only person that could that night.

Cutting edgy genre

You sir, are an unprincipled cad. And your cat's ugly. — You sir, are an unprincipled cad. And your cat’s ugly.

But it’s the next bit that really worries me. Can I write in the cutting edgy genre? Cutting edge used to mean really like now. And really like now then is like Filofaxes, ties that look like a piano keyboard and Su Pollard; you can sort of get it and its harmless enough but you wouldn’t do it anymore. Maybe cutting edgy is different though, like an arch Noel Coward looking for another dime bag, Sherlock Holmes when the Duke of Dumfries says no way dude, you still owe me for all the Charlie for Vicky’s Jubilee bash.

Come on. All they want is someone to ‘flesh the script out,’ or change it from an overall plot with some characters to an actual story where you know who says what and how they get to the place where they say it. That’s not hard, is it? So what’s the problem? Well, there’s a few of them. It’s in West London for a start, 150 miles from me which is a long commute especially when you have a tendency to forget your packed lunch. It means working with the original creative, who obviously isn’t that creative or he’d have written the thing already instead of just extended notes. And there’s no money, so it’s being run on someone’s trust fund.

The shrill repetition of ‘this is a paid-for job’ bothers me too. Instead of what, an unpaid job? That’s not a job. It’s either voluntary work, like helping out at the Red Cross jumble sale, or it’s internship, the kind of socially acceptable totally illegal because it breaches minimum-wage legislation slavery for people with rich mummies and daddies that you can eat between deals. That’s what this is. Keep the poor poor. They’ve got the creative writer who isn’t creative and the film director without a film but Pops will fix it. It’s Tim and Jonty’s Gep Yah, isn’t it?

So like WTF, I don’t think I do these kinds of abbreviations. Maybe I’m just too cutting edgy.

Reviews

After the free weekend promotion for Not Your Heart Away one or two people actually downloaded the book. To sound like a school assembly for a moment, the kind Ben and Liz, Claire and Poppy and Peter would all have been bored by and utterly familiar, you know who you are. It is those people I want to talk to now. The rest of you are here because of those people and I want you all to think about that.

When you read it, whatever you think about it, please, just please review it. All that means is write down what you think about it. It’s made some people wistfully happy. It’s made other people cry. When I read it I feel restless, as if I want to go to the places in the book. I went to all of them once.

Location

Every location I wrote about is a real place. But you can’t go there. No-one can. The pub isn’t a pub any more. Claire’s house is a spa for Olympic athletes (no, it really is. I never, ever appreciated quite how big it was until I found that out). At Ben’s house the garden was split into two and sold off and the house went for pennies in 2012. Everything changes. Even love. Maybe especially love.

So rather than maundering off down that track, write down what you think about it. Then post it up to Amazon or Goodreads or wherever else you can think of, please. Even if you don’t like it. Just say why.

See? I could have been a teacher. Gissajob. I could have been a teacher. I’ve got a tweed coat and cord trousers. I can say no running in the corridors, how many times have I told you, I am not in the habit of handing out detentions but you need some time to think about what you’ve done. I don’t want to see you again.

I’ve got empathy, too. I know what it’s like to be on the end of those words. After all, plenty of people have said that last bit to me.