Very little sleep last night – we were back very late from Pulborough Brooks and didn’t actually hit the pillows till gone midnight (it’s an hour’s drive from home). However, we did manage to see a whitethroat, a chiffchaff and a woodcock, as well as the spoonbill still on the Brooks, plus an assortment of finches and the usual suspects. And we heard nightingales and – result! – nightjars and saw a woodcock. Fabulous. So it’s worth the pain today then, and makes the nightmare of yesterday a tad more manageable. Just a tad though ...

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Editing is hell. There is no other way to describe the exercise. It's like performing root-canal treatment on yourself with nothing to hand but a small hand-drill and a bottle of vodka. The biggest problem is that you start to feel as though your book is 'getting away from you'.


By that I mean that by instigating those well meant (and undoubtedly correct) edits, suggestions and pointers that your editor gives you, you will change the book so fundamentally that it will be transformed into something that isn't yours anymore.



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Over at Vulpes Libris I've been talking about something I've talked about here more than once: what I think it is that defines literary fiction. It's been an interesting exercise, not least because I wanted to set up a general discussion about how literary fiction works: some terms, some ways of thinking about it, and why it's worth bothering with. What I didn't want to do is say 'X is literary and Y isn't literary,' because people will always argue about that: what's 'difficult', what's 'worth it', is always going to be a very muddly mixture of objective and subjective reactions. It seems to me much more interesting to unpick the question, and let people try mapping it onto their own reading, and see if they agree.

In fact, it seems to me that most of the blood that's shed when people start discussing and classifying books is because it's so hard to separate out what a book evokes in you from what it is of itself.

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The authors reading before me are all awful and tedious and I find the whole thing embarrassing. Authors should be secretive, shadowy figures, a figment of the reader’s imagination, something otherworldly lurking out of sight. Here they are now on a makeshift stage just metres away from normal people, desperately flogging their work and stripping the process bare of magic and mystery.

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Ye gods, what a day. Managed to have a bit of a lie-in and got up at 7.30am, hurrah. So an extra hour-and-a-quarter's kip, which I have seriously needed today. It was just a shame that the nasty plumber who's chasing Lord H for a Church Hall cheque which Lord H gave him two weeks ago rang at 8.45am and was generally rude. I swore at him, told him he should check his post more often and put the phone down. I then deleted the five equally rude messages the tosser has left during the week. In one's forties, one finds one has no qualms about being rude to idjits. Aha!

The rest of the day has involved a heck of a lot of travel, some visiting of the sick and a much-appreciated moment of genuine laughter with the Tesco car cleaning man ...

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Right, I'm away for a few days from tomorrow, taking a well earned break.

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What a lot of rain today. I suspect we may have had our summer, or perhaps there’ll be a late one? You never know your luck. Anyway, our loo remains in the state of unrest it reached just before we went on holiday. Sadly. The bad news is it won’t flush but the good news is we’re using buckets of water instead – which is better for the environment. Ah, there’s always a silver lining, you know. Must be the happy pills – I’m feeling a darn sight better today, I must say. The only problem is that if I’m not concentrating, then most of the bucket of water ends up on the floor, so I have to mop it all up and try again. Goodness only knows how the menfolk manage at all ...

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I was interested to discover that, like Mozart, Vaughan Williams' instrument was the viola. The viola? The instrument that has as many jokes made about it as Skoda cars do? Even though Amadeus may have been an exercise in fascinating historical fiction, no one could accuse Mozart of being uninterested in high-visibility showmanship. Anyone who's heard the Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis would be forgiven for assuming that RVW was a string player. And yet, though it does make a beautiful sound, it's possibly the most invisible in the orchestra, because its timbre blends with the violins and the cellos, and by definition it's almost always playing the inner parts. Rarely does the viola get a tune you could sing, nor is it the underpinning bass that defines the harmonies: the joke about what you call a violist at the bottom of the sea ('a start') is only one which other musicians tell about how dispensible it is.

So why did it appeal to at least two great composers?

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… Sigh. And what a big sigh it is. Was quite tearful last night and this morning at the thought of going back to work. It’s still weighing on my shoulders now really. That’s always the minus side of going on holiday: you have to damn well come back. Groan. Though Lord H did lift the existential gloom a little by making my breakfast napkin into a candle shape, courtesy of our new napkin folding skills. What a hero. I wonder what tomorrow’s shape will be. Still, here at the office coalface first thing this morning, I was so depressed I could barely talk to anyone and only managed a few words beyond a passing grunt at eleven o’clock. I think that’s probably my quota for the day then ...

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Mrs A, Mrs B and Mr C, you won’t remember me, and you’re probably dead by now anyway, but I must inform you that you were in the wrong business; there was no love of children in the ranting and terrifying tirades that you poured over our little primary heads. Somewhere in your lives you all took a wrong turn or were following a path that you should never have been on. I see you raising your hand with a ‘but’, but the fact is you are three out of perhaps six or seven teachers. You are the only stars of this show – none of the others left a mark either physical or mental on me; they are invisible. Almost fifty years ago, Mrs A, you made me stand in the corner of a cold cloakroom, alone, for swapping my blue pencil with the red one given to the boy behind me. I was four years old and you were my first experience of the education establishment; you certainly left an impression on me.

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