'Hello this is Talkradio, and I will now transfer you to the programme desk'. I listened to some Irish sporting news for about five minutes, except I wasn't really listening because I wsa so nervous. Eventually, when Fionn Davenport introduced the programme and said they were going to kick off with an item about China I felt a bit calmer. The other three panel members were in the studio in Dublin and I was a 'on the line from London, Sheila Cornelius, visiting Lecturer in Film at Morley College.' That was a while back, and taken from the blurb on the back of my book, but I wasn't about to interrupt him. For one thing he was speaking very quickly and was already putting a question to the first panellist, a Mr Wang, who was head of a Chinese school in Dublin.

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On the days not spent at TV shopping channels I’ve been hanging around the Harper Collins offices, spending time in the different departments and trying to be dazzling and memorable. When the workers look as though their tolerance of my presence is ebbing away, I try to make myself useful. What starts with a polite offer to take a parcel from one office to another culminates in a two-hour stint at a photocopier for one of the secretaries while she enjoys an extended break in the coffee room, and I begin to suspect that they are taking advantage of me. When Doris the cleaner trundles up to me with a mop and bucket and asks if I could give the women’s toilets ‘a quick going over,’ although the opportunity of a leisurely examination of the different machines and bins is momentarily intriguing, I decline and revaluate my tactics.

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i've just posted two brilliant cat cartoon films. very funny. x

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Today is Glyndebourne day and we're off to see Love and Other Demons. This is filling me with terror as I hated the book so much and - Lordy - but it's a newly commissioned opera. Will there be tunes? Will I have to run screaming from the auditorium in the knowledge that I am not intellectual enough or musical enough to understand it?? All these questions - and more - will, I fear, be answered by the close of play today. The plot thickens, Carruthers ...


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What a fabulous holiday - we've had a seriously great time. And that in spite of the rain, which didn't dampen our spirits one jot, hurrah. Pause now for Boring Birder Moment (AKA BBM): we've seen 15 new birds in Norfolk, double hurrah! Including the bearded tit (my target bird for the week and identified by ... um ... me, even before our tour expert for the day could get to it), a spotted redshank, eider ducks, yellow wagtails, marsh harriers, reed bunting, gannet, a red-legged partridge, two golden pheasants, a ruff, several whimbrels, a sandwich tern, a willow warbler, two tree creepers and two yellowhammers. Well gosh! And yellowhammers really do sing: a little bit of bread and no cheeee-eese. Right in front of us on top of a bush too, Gawd bless it ...


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A few days ago, the British press went loopy over a debut author. Her name is Lorna Page, but that’s not what the papers were calling her. No – her proper media name is “93-year-old Lorna Page.”

So she was born 93 years ago and happens not to have died in the meantime. To the press, however, this means that she is a sweet little old lady (where did all the big, nasty old ladies go?) who has been ever so clever and amazingly compos mentis enough to write a whole novel all by her little old self.



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For a while now I've been considering starting another blog, or blog type thing. It would be a place where people could share what they love, whatever that might be, anonymously. But, aside from suggesting people put their loved things in a comment box, for me to upload onto the main page after, I've no idea how it would work.

Any thoughts?

Anyway, I think, if I were to start it, that this is how it would begin:

I love, that moment before a shiver.

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I've just been reminded what a tremendously useful book this is (I was describing someone as a 'let-down' and needed to know whether the hyphen was correct. It is.). Writers, if you don't already own a copy, I'd give serious thought to putting that right.
***
I'm about three quarters through type-setting the stories and poems for my writing group's collection (I finished proofing and editing them yesterday).

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My mother was a Mantle-machinist; that means she made the whole coat – she didn’t do piece-work…in fact she sneered at piece-work. I always got the idea that she felt powerful because of her skills; I know that she worked to her own timetable and her boss let her away with murder, apparently. I vaguely remember the mention of a company called Silvers. (for security purposes I will give my parents new names). Mum can be Queenie and Dad shall be Father Ted – but he wasn’t Irish or priestly.

She made most of our clothes. One of my jobs was to rock the treadle for her sewing machine, though I don’t suppose I did it for more than a few minutes. I couldn’t wait to try on her creations, especially when the dresses had a beautifully long and wide sash that tied in a great bow in my back; there’s a red one in my memory that I never tired of twisting at the mirror to see.


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The agent called yesterday. So it wasn't an outright, 'Flawless! Let's storm the publishing world!' but it was the next best thing.

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