I have learned that one or two key words inserted into a post send the blog hit-ometer right the way round the dial. Marilyn Monroe does it. George Clooney does it. On a more serious note, I now know that a mention of M.E. does it. It also brings a deluge of e-mails and it is easier to answer them in a post as the questions they ask, and the general gist of them, is quite similar overall. I do not have any specialist knowledge of M.E. other than having had it for three and a half years in my mid-20s. That is a long time ago and it was not called M.E. - some doctors called it Royal Free Disease - but it was a recognised syndrome. I learned a few things about it which I will pass on - though I doubt if they will prove very useful. M.E. is probably the most boring illness known to man - though more usually, to woman ; boring to the one who has it, boring to their doctor, boring to their friends and family and boring for everyone who reads about it, so the first thing I learned was to shut up about it. For some reason a lot of people seem to feel that M.E. is an interesting illness to write and so read about. It is not. It is not fatal, it is not terminal, it is not life-threatening. It is tiresome, wearisome, debilitating, draggy and energy sapping and it takes you from a lot of fun, pleasure, achievement and other activity. It can be painful, it is always dull-ing. It scrambles your brain and makes you tired and depressed and in between you are well and  then it goes. In a month, three months, three years. It just goes. I was fortunate to have a very sound consultant neurologist to give me, even then, the best advice I could have had. It applied to me then and I think it probably applies to people who have M.E. now.

He ruled out much nastier neurological diseases after a battery of tests, and satisfied himself that all my symptoms were due to a virus, or a post-viral state. He then told me the following - the gist of it anyway.

That it was not fatal or terminal and it would not last forever. That it was self-limiting. That if I found anything that helped my symptons, then within sensible limits, go for it. No two people were the same, no two things worked for everyone. That there was no treatment and no cure.

In those days the whole Complementary squillion-pound business had not really got going but he warned me against wasting time and even more, money, on doubtful therapies and dodgy 'cures' because nothing, NOTHING, had been found to work. I think that is probably even more true now and there are certainly a whole lot more charlatans out there, but one or two things have come to the fore which do seem to help some people cope with their symptoms or even alleviate those a bit.

He said the best way to treat it was with disdain. That when I had a good spell I should make best use of it but not overdo things because I would probably find that counter-productive. (I did.)

He said to try and find one person, friend or family member, or even doctor, to whom I could talk about it but otherwise, not to bore people about it. A terminal or very dramatic but short term illness is always well received. A dreary long-term chronic one is not.

I read between the lines here and realised he was telling me not to be a very public victim to my condition. It`s easy to do.

He also said the best thing to focus on was ANYTHING ELSE. If I caught myself thinking about my symptoms, swerve away and focus on something outside myself. That proved very good advice then and it has continued to prove so since. Not easy. But it really does help. Apart from anything else, if you succeed you can give yourself a pat on the back.

Patience was the other key. If you accept what you`ve got and don`t waste energy running round looking for cures, that is especially helpful. 'Accept' is not synonymous with 'give in to.' Subtle difference which you do learn.

And so he sent me away. I found that a low dose of a mild anti-depressant - in those days amitryptaline - was helpful in bad bouts, as it made me sleep and that most physical exercise made everything worse. If I tried, say, to play tennis, which I had loved to do, that brought on at least 3 weeks of  bad M.E. Short walks were all I could do, and some stretching exercises. That has had a lingering effect. Before M.E. I was extremely sporty and active and I never regained that energy.

I found that when my brain was too scrambled to write it was better not to try as I wrote rubbish and got cross with myself. I could usually read. I was keeping body and s. together in those days writing a  weekly full page of book reviews for the local paper. I had to do those and just about managed it most of the time but I think the quality of my work often suffered.

Alcohol was one of the  very worst things for my symptoms. Nothing else I ate or drank had any effect.

Staying in bed all morning did not help at all and it made me very low-spirited. I made myself get up and dressed even if only to spend the day in a chair. I learned not to make many plans as the condition is totally unpredictable and plans were usually scuppered. I learned that a quiet life, an even tenor of days, was best.

I know that nothing really helped otherwise. There is no cure and no treatment, only management of your condition/symptoms.

The consultant had said that one day, it would just go. After 3 and a half years of trying to get on with my life with M.E. and shutting up about it, for various reasons I decided to move, from a flat on the outskirts of Coventry  to a new house in Leamington Spa. I wanted some more space, to be nearer more friends, to live in a nicer area... Moving house was no fun as of course it brought on a horrible bout of M.E. but I had lots of help. I settled in, had some good days, got to know my neighbours, started to think about a novel.. and waited for the next bout.

It never came. It simply never came. The M.E. had gone, as the doc. had said it would. Why ? Who knows ? I don`t. It could have had something to do with moving but I don`t see how or why and it would be a drastic course of action to take if you then discovered it had made no difference so I couldn`t recommend that as a cure.

For the rest of my life I have never ever had those symptoms again. In more recent years I have had tiresome ones caused by a mast-cell disease - mastocytocis - for which there is also no cure but there are now many fairly effective palliative treatments. Whether mast-cells ever had anything to do with the M.E no one can be sure but it has been suggested. However, some doctors have tried using the same medications on current M.E. sufferers, with absolutely no effect.

I am sorry to all those who e-mailed me asking for the magic bullet. I don`t have one. I didn`t have one then and I still do not but I do think there are new ways of helping with symptom management. Many people have found cognitive therapy very helpful in that respect and if I think about it, I believe that the consultant  I saw at Queen`s Square all those years ago was employing C.T. principles before the term was ever invented.

M.E. is a bore. But one thing I really, really did find helpful was to remind myself that I did not have leukaemia or some other intractable and terrible disease which would cut short my life before I was 30. Spoil a few years of it, it undoubtedly did. But I`m still here.

I spent 3 days in the smoke recording the audiobook of THE BATTLE FOR GULLYWITH. I gave myself the job when I remembered that I had once read a book of my own on Woman`s Hour and what was good enough for them ought to be good enough for Long Barn Listening, the audio book arm of Long Barn Books. We didn`t publish the book itself, Bloomsbury did, but I like to hold onto audio rights of as many of my own books as I can. With download to ipod  as well as CDs these are now worth a few bob.

But I discovered all over again that reading books aloud is not what I want to do when I grow up. It`s really, really boring and really really tiring. The studio was in a converted garage in a bungaloid bit of what you might call Inner Surrey. There is no daylight of course, the air is warm because the whole place is padded like a nuclear bunker, and very dry and the temperature is a steady 75 degrees. I also spotted everything that was wrong with the book. But with the help of two cheery sound engineers we got through with only 10 bottles of water each and now tis done and will be available as CD audiobook and download, from October.

Back home to a pearl grey sky and delicious cool soft warm rain which is just the sort of weather I love. Waterloo station was a fashion disaster. There were lots of over but badly dressed young women going to Ascot wearing a strange assortment of summer frocks with pashminas and fascinators at odd angles. Well, to be fair, there is  no other angle at which to wear one. I do think fascinators are common. The worst was a very tall very large girl wearing a lime green mini skirted frock, a bright canary yellow pashmina, a  vivid pink feathered fascinator and, er, flip flops. And there was her bloke looking stunning in grey top hat and tails. All the men on Waterloo station looked stunning and I am sad to say not a single one of the girls. But it was the Saturday.

Apologies to all those whose comments were waiting for my approval but I couldn`t access the admin page of my blog while I was away. You`re all up there now.

I will be back later with a reply to a deluge of e-mails I have had after mentioning having had M.E. I can also now tell those who asked what my new short novel THE BEACON is about.

In my 20s I had what is now called ME for 4 years and one symptom which recurred was double vision. As a result of it, I once had to pull over onto the hard shoulder of a fast dual carriageway at night because I was seeing two of every light. It was very very frightening and though I was rescued by the AA and taken safely home, I became an anxious driver. The anxiety increased after I had the Elder D and took the form of panic atacks when I drove and a strange visual distortion of the road which appeared to be tipping sideways. Sounds weird. Was weirder. And of course frightening. I more or less stopped driving because if you are walking along a pavement and it suddenly seems to tip sideways, it doesn`t much matter. If you are driving a car at almost any speed at all, it does. I despaired. And then we moved to the country and a village 8 miles outside Oxford, from which I would have to go, somehow, to shops, nursery school, doctor, everywhere.  At that time, the SP was a fellow of an Oxford College and one evening at a guest dinner I sat next to a don who mentioned that his wife was a clinical psychologist. I had no idea what they did, only what psychiatrists were. He said that among other things they helped people overcome fears and phobias not by having them spend 2 years lying on a couch and go through being born but by talking and encouraging and gradually desensitizing them. They had great success with agoraphobia. I remembered his name and asked for a GP referral to his wife`s clinic. It was at the Warneford Hospital, Oxford and I saw not the don`s wife whose name was Gillian Butler, but one of her colleagues. It was on the NHS, it was brilliant and painless and after 4 sessions I went back to the car and drove on roads which no longer tipped sideways, causing me to have panic attacks. Some years later, I came upon a new book called MANAGE YOUR MIND. THE MENTAL FITNESS GUIDE  by the same Gillian Butler and (Tony Hope ). I do not buy self-help books, can`t stand them, they`re mainly American with terrible long but bracing titles and in the trade are known as HowTo books. (There is even one called How to write a HowTo book..) But Ijust had a hunch that this would be a standby book that I would find interesting and useful. It did. It has. So much so that I just acquired a new copy of the latest edition. And I can unhesitatingly say that anyone with any sort of emotional or psychological or life-problem could not find a better book. It is not all for everyone. You pick and choose. And within a section which you might find relevant, you also pick and choose because everyone is different, no one size of tackling a problem fits all. It is full of common sense, it is practical, it is optimistic without being gung-ho, it is realistic, it is clear, it is extremely well designed on the page and so easy to follow. Let me quote from it so that you can see what I mean. I acknowledge here and now that I`m quoting verbatim, since a well-known media psychiatrist has got himself into hot water this week, for plagiarising whole chunks of work by his peers. Goodness, I am surprised, given the affidavits I have to sign every time I send in am MA essay, to say that it is all my own work, that any quotations have been full acknowledged and all references given in triplicate.

This is one of the most handy sections of a very handy book which I commend to you. It`s called

THIRTEEN KIND OF CROOKED THINKING.

1. CATASTROPHIZING. Predicting the worst outcome. (Every twinge a terminal illness.)

2. OVER-GENERALIZING. Assuming that because something happened once it will always happen. ('I am always going to put my foot in it.')

3. EXAGERRATING.  Giving negative events more importance than they really deserve.

4. DISCOUNTING THE POSITIVE. Rejecting  good things as if they did not count. ('She only did that to make me feel better.' 'What, this old thing ? I bought it at a jumble sale ?')

5. MIND READING. Believing you know what others are thinking. ('I know he thinks I`m stupid.')

6. PREDICTING THE FUTURE/FORTUNE TELLING.

('Everything is bound to go wrong.'  'I will ever be able to cope.')

7. BLACK AND WHITE THINKING. ('If I can`t get this right I might as well give up altogether.' 'One mistake and the whole thing is ruined.')

8.  TAKING THINGS PERSONALLY.  ('The waiter isn`t coming over because he doesn`t like the look of me.')

9. TAKING THE BLAME.. when it isn`t your fault.

10.EMOTIONAL REASONING.  MISTAKING FEELINGS FOR FACTS. ('I am really worried, so something must have gone wrong.')

11. NAME CALLING. ('I am a complete idiot.')

12.  SCARE MONGERING. ( 'People do suddenly drop dead, you read about it in the papers.' 'A bird died so it`s bound to be  the start of the avian flu pandemic.)

13.  WISHFUL THINKING.  Everything would be all right if only you were thinner, younger, prettier, richer....

This excellent check list is followed by two others - one of pressurizing words to watch out for. SHOULD, MUST, HAVE TO and OUGHT  and the other of Extremist words to  watch out for. ALWAYS, NEVER and NOBODY.

The book is not just about language but language plays a  very important part in how we think, feel, react. If you have, or know anyone who has, a phobia, a fear, an irrational worry, has suffered some trauma, common or uncommon, is depressed or permanently anxious then you know that these things can and do spoil life. MANAGE YOUR MIND isn`t  quick-fix 'get happy' book. It`s far far better than that.

Another new book arrived today. It is called THE CHURCH IN ANGLO-SAXON SOCIETY by John Blair. There is a quote on the front. 'Readers of this marvellous book will be transformed.'

There now, I`ve given you two books to change your life.

Riveting. Class I mean. The subtleties and nuances of the English class system are absolutely fascinating. They occupy many a waking thought of mine. Because every time someone says we are now a classless society up pops June and the Trooping of the Colour and all those people wearing silly outfits on Garter Day and now Royal Ascot and the whole merry-go-round of debate begins again. There is absolutely no doubt that we are still a classs-ridden/class-divided society. Some of the lines have got a bit blurred that`s all. So who are posh ?  What makes someone posh ?Easier to say what posh is not. It certainly isn`t the mere possession of money. Are Wayne and Colleen or Jordan and Peter posh ? I rest my case. You can be posh with or without money - there are plenty of poor aristos. They can lose all their money in a Lloyds  crash or because the roof of the Stately H. falls in, they may move to a retirement bungalow and eat ready meals - but nothing, nothing, nothing  will change the  essential poshness of the aristo with title going back centuries. Without a bean to his name he would walk into the Royal Enclosure this afternoon, no Qs asked. ( Though there are mutterings about that not being what it was, any old riff-raff can get in, de-blah. It`s still posh though, whereas the Grand National at Aintree, is and always will be, its polar opposite.)

Can you acquire poshness ? Where you went to school helps but because of its rich endowments which provide so many scholarships Eton, for example, is open to anyone who is clever and can pass the exam. I know two people from extremely humble backgrounds who got music scholarships there. Over the years, one became rather posh as a result, the other never did. If you are posh to begin with you can get away with going to a comprehensive, but otherwise such an educational background militates against your rising the poshness ladder. Posh is definitely no longer Oxbridge, both of which have been falling  over themselves for years to  shed the posh image and attract people from state schools. (They then discover that lowering the standards to let them in doesn`t do anyone favours, that most of those who get in under such terms can`t keep up and  that the drop-out rate is rising worryingly fast -but that`s their problem.)  A majority of posh young people now go to Edinburgh or St Andrew`s or Bristol.

Posh is accent. Hm. Perhaps. But many a posh ex-public school boy hastens to acquire estuary English so as not to appear different or, er, posh.  Still, you can always switch your real voice back on if needs be whereas once a Brummie-accent always a...

Posh is the armed force. Ah, now we`re getting somewhere. This is where you  will still see the class divide bang down the middle. Posh is officers and Sandhurst, not-posh is squaddies and SMs. That is as true now as it was 100 years ago. Posh is the Royal Navy officer class.  And there is absolutely no one posh in the RAF.

Posh is having a lot of leisure time on your hands. Yes. But then again, no. Royals  and the rest of the posh can have endless time off to spend at Ascot and other posh bun fights. So, in theory, can the unemployed. What`s the difference ? Try getting the average job seeker into the Royal Enclosure and you`ll soon find out.

The posh have silly rules and rituals and codes by which they recognise one another and one of the most wonderfully entertaining sights on earth is that of the aspiring-posh trying to work their way through them in an effort to belong.  Taking on the camouflage is so important. Watch those who marry into the royal family.. some of them manage it without apparent effort, others never.  But what about the reverse ? All classes have silly entry rules and rituals and codes which separate them off and many people would fail to fit in, like those women who marry Masai tribal warriors.  How to distinguish posh from non-posh is easy once you get to food. Rule of thumb. No one who holds their knife like a pencil can ever be posh and the time at which people eat in the evening is a good guide to how posh they are. You see how silly it all is and yet how absolutely riddled every aspect of our lives is with the posh/non-posh differential ? It does not matter a toss how you hold your knife but to the posh, it is a crucial litmus test of whether a person is 'one of us' or not. They do not apply it consciously. It is totally instinctive. That is why, like Japanese knotweed and ground elder, it will prove impossible ever to eradicate it.

Perhaps the class division was once protective, a way of keeping out intruders and strangers and enemies, like a drawbridge. Is it still ? Yes, to some extent. Old money will never accept new money, established upper will never welcome climber. One of the saddest sights is the lonely lottery winner, no longer accepted by his own people, sitting in the biggest house in a neighbourhood where he is a stranger and to all of whose ways he is a  foreigner, unwelcome, unvisited and, when he tries to throw his money about, derided.  I know well someone whose husband has made squillions  in business. They have both done a great deal of good with it but I have heard them sniggered at behind their backs more than once by old- money posh.

The Tory party was always posh but during the reign of Mrs Thatcher the posh members began to complain that it was being infiltrated by second-hand car salesmen. I daresay it was.  But now it is sudddenly very posh again. Young toffs have taken over. They may pretend that they are not toffs but they are and you can tell it not by the schools they went to or their money or their suits or their accents -though they have all of those things.  You tell it by the absence in all of their history of any real relationship to the rest of us, to how ordinary people live, work, play, suffer, struggle with bills. They are the ones who may choose to send their children to a state primary or an NHS clinic, choose to cycle round London.. but the operative word is 'choose.'  They have no experience of living without such choice - to have to put up with a bad local hospital, poor public transport, officious jobsworths against whom they have no ammunition, poor housing, absent police. Easy to choose when you have a safety net. The posh have the safety net of money and HOW TO USE IT TO BEST ADVANTAGE, assumption of superior status, an education which has reinforced their position by teaching them more tricks. This comes as a birthright so that you may lose all your money, even the roof over your head, but you will never lose the ability to thread your way through the system to your own advantage.

So, class doesn`t matter a jot and yet it matters more than any other single facet of our lives. It brings incalculable benefits, it puts you on a higher rung of every ladder. If you are posh you have nothing to fear until the barbarians are at the gates - and they have been there so often but then failed to seize the advantage that the posh can be forgiven for thinking it can never happen. I think they`re probably right.

Talking of posh, I see David Cameron has now got a rather sad  and lonely looking wind turbine to decorate his house. What a pointless gesture. I know it is pointless because after our winter quarter electricity bill, I decided to investigate wind turbines (I know, I know, of course it was silly, of course the whole thing is madness, we need oil and coal and nuclear but I am only human and for a fleeting second I reneged on all my anti-green principles...) Two surveyors came and spoke a lot of eco-rubbish and then said we were ideally placed for putting up 6 of the second- largest size wind turbines on top of our hill. It`s prevailing westerly and we get a lot of wind.  I had fantasies of never having another electricity bill and even sharing our largesse with the rest of the village. Then I got a written estimate. It would cost around £25,000 to install the turbines and they would pay for themselves in savings on our electricity in, er, 37 years.

I do keep resting my case don`t I ?

Yesterday`s Sunday Times carried an interesting summing up by the always-worth-reading Bryan Appleyard, on the Richard and Judy book club and the effect it has had on the publishing  trade since its inception. I have blogged about this before, as you know but Appleyard makes one point, almost in passing, which I made. The people who buy the R and J Book Club choices follow the Club/Books not the authors. This means, essentially, that it is a BOOK which is selected not an author. When a book is selected for R AND J it represents a lottery -win -but with a difference. This is that if you go on buying lottery tickets after a win you have the same chance of winning the lottery with your next and subsequent tickets as you did before. With R and J you have no chance because they will never choose an author twice.  When it was discovered that R AND J had such a huge effect on sales, the pound signs lit up in the eyes of literary agents, who asked for much bigger advances for an author whose book had been selected. In some cases, at the beginning, they got those huge increases because they and publishers assumed that the R AND J factor would carry-over to the author's subsequent books - and indeed, have a big effect on their backlist too. It didn`t happen. The next book by an R AND J author did not sell in mega quantities, it sold what it would have done before R AND J came along. It had no effect on the backlist either. The reason is that the people who buy every book recommended by R AND J buy the books, the titles, they don`t buy the author - in many cases they may well not recognise the author`s name out of context at all. There is brand loyalty, R AND J being the brand, but no author loyalty at all. Indeed, a friend of mine who runs a bookshop was asked for a book by someone called ARTHUR GEORGE.  He spent ages looking up the author, without success.. until the frustrated customer said surely he must have  a copy of every book recommended by Richard and Judy ? Light switch moment. The book was, of course - yes, I know, you all got there ages ago - ARTHUR AND GEORGE, by Julian Barnes. When my friend said the name of the author, it was the customer`s turn to look blank.

But I have discovered that something quite different has happened to me. It happened to other novelists too- to P.D. James and Ruth Rendell , Lee Child and Michael Connolly, Peter James and Ian Rankin - to name only crime writers. People follow the author, they ask for 'the new...' Readers are very loyal and it is a wonderful thing. I am loyal to certain authors myself. What does it take to lose that loyalty ? Certainly not one book which is not up to scratch, or which is a  bit different... it takes quite a few 'bad' books before the readers finally give up once they have registered as Loyal. Amazing really. This sort of reader loyalty has to be allowed to build up over the years and many books. It doesn`t happen overnight. But it does stand the test of time. My readers are wonderfully loyal and I am very very grateful to them.  Of course it is always possible that an author whose book is an R AND J choice will atttract some readers who become Loyal, who buy the next and the next and the next. I`m sure it does happen. But not as often as you might think.  I can remember the names of the authors whose books I will always buy, but I am blowed if I can remember many, or indeed, ANY, of the book titles.  On the other hand, I can remember, say, a dozen titles of books which have been R AND J selections - but I`m blowed if I can remember any of their authors - except one. Arthur George does stick very firmly in the memory.

In reply to a comment question and for anyone else wanting to know... I will dig out all the old VW for D posts and put them back up as and when I have time. They will go in the Categories box on the right under WOOLF FOR DUMMIES OLD POSTS. I will then start a new category in the autumn  and title is WOOLF FOR DUMMIES WINTER 2008/9  so those who followed the course previously can ignore the old stuff if they wish.

You don`t need to enrol, just follow the posts as they come and comment if you wish. To get the most out of it you should obviously do the reading. (Should that be 'obviously, you should do the reading ?' 'You should do the reading, obviously.'  ?)

AND HURRAH ! People who want gongs and bongs should have them, as I said earlier. So Hurrah for some friends who have got gongs today..

DAME JOAN BAKEWELL

DAME MARGARET DRABBLE

They both also get the NBBT AWARD....NOT BEFORE BLOODY TIME.

(Answers to where the line comes from on a postcard please. ) But the story begins even longer ago. In 1986, I had a letter from a man called Stephen Mallatratt who was working at the Stephen Joseph Theatre, Scarborough, with Alan Ayckbourn. Because I had happy memoirs of the theatre when it was The Library Theatre and Scarborough being my home town and all, I took his letter slightly more seriously than I might have done otherwise. You see he was asking permission to adapt my ghost novel The Woman in Black for the stage. Madness. If you have read the book you will know what madness it was - how could you possibly put a house at the end of a causeway, which gets covered at high tide, a pony and trap which vanishes into it, trains, London fogs.... well, you couldn`t. Film possibly, stage no. But because it was Scarborough and.. well, I said yes and forgot all about it. A year later, a script came through the door. It was a day on which I was heading for London so I threw the package at the SP and suggested he read it if he wanted a laugh. 'That man who wanted to adapt WIB for the theatre has done it and they want to put it on at Christmas in the studio theatre !!!'

When I got home the script was on the kitchen table. 'You,' the SP said, 'had better read that. Because it is absolutely brilliant.'

And so it was. He had done the impossible - used my book without changing much, even used a lot of the actual text of it verbatim, and yet made it entirely itself, a theatrical experience in its own right. I was astounded. I telephoned Stephen to say so.

We agreed that it would run for 3 weeks in the tiny studio theatre as a side-kick to the pantomime in the main house. I went up to see it - I think the studio seated about 80 people - and there on  was the first of many many occasions I was riveted by the play.

Alan Ayckbourn said there were now two great plays adapted from ghost stories, The Turn of the Screw .. and this.

We expected it to run for 3 weeks and when there was talk of it transferring to London we were dubious. 'It`ll never work there' everyone said, and Stephen and I most loudly of all.

The film director Ken Russell agreed - the first run was at the Lyris Hammersmith and they filmed the audience coming out for a late night arts programme, asking some for their immediate reactions. Russell was scathing. He dismissed it out of hand. Wouldn`t last a week. I have always thought what a good omen that turned out to be because the play moved to a couple of other theatres for brief runs before finding its perfect home, The Fortune, alongside the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. And there it has just entered clocked up 20 years. It also plays round the world. It has been on in Mexico City for 13 years. I saw it in Barcelona in Catalan. It has wowed audiences in Tokyo three times, in India, up and down Australia.....it never fails thanks to Stephen`s genius.

We used to ring one another up from time to time and have a tremendous laugh about it. Laugh ? We cried with it. 'That little show.... you said it would never work.. 3 weeks max we gave it... that madman who wanted to adapt it..'  We would crack up time after time.

I so wish we could crack up now, as we mark 20 years. I miss those calls. There would surely have been one this week. But Stephen died of an especially dreadful form of leukaemia. I can`t call him but I bet he`s raising a heavenly glass and having a laugh. I can hear it.

Here`s to you Stephen. Here`s to us. Here`s to 'our little lady.' Here`s to another 20 years.

Oh, and here`s to Ken Russell too.

This morning I went out into 2 small towns and 1 supermarket and I am sure CCTV picked me up twenty times. If I have nicked a cabbage they`ll come to get me later. As it was I parked my car for 6 minutes over the time I`d paid for so I got a £40 fine. It was a fair cop, 6 minutes is 6 minutes, even if  I am cross with myself. If they come round to mine and find bomb-making equipment in the shed with my prints on it and some inflammatory terrorist websites on my computer, I am going to expect them to take me in and hold me pending further investigations - 42 hours, 42 days or 420 days or as long as it takes. 

For God`s sake, what is David David about ? ID cards...? Great. Bring them on. I had one in the war hung round my little tiny neck on a ribbon. It will save all this utility bill and driving licence rubbish. At least I hope so. If you are innocent you have nothing to fear and most of us are. I didn`t nick the cabbage, there is no bomb-making equipment in the shed. But if there were....

I simply do not understand what all this fuss is about. If I don't pay the parking fine, they will double it and I will get a court order because my numberplate gives them my name and address and quite right too. I`m not innocent. I have everything to fear. But otherwise I spent a blameless morning and if I am o 1,000 CCTVs SO WHAT ? It is a weapon the police need. They capture robbers and terrorists and murderers on it and as a result they sometimes catch them.  I thought this was a good thing.

Now if David Davis and the other complainers had taken a stand against Political Correctness and the erosion of our right to free speech I might understand. I think he has gone mad - and of course he has committed political suicide but that`s up to him. I just don`t understand his problem or indeed anybody else`s, with CCTV and with holding  in custody people who might be about to blow up and kill hundreds of people until they have established the facts. The police are not about to arrest and hold  anyone they fancy  for 42 days on a random basis - why would they ? There are checks and balances. Any magistrate would agree that I should have received my parking penalty this morning but none would agree to them arresting and holding me as a potential terrorist. 

Now someone tell me why I`ve got it all wrong.

Someone asked me to bring back book recommendations .. they haven't gone away, I have just written about other things. I don`t regard myself as a blogger who talks a lot about the latest books because although dozens of them pile in through the door unbidden, I read only the few that take my fancy and go for long periods without anything like  a new title anywhere near. It has been one of those recently, though I did - and still do - recommend Helen Rappaport`s EKATERINBURG. THE LAST DAYS OF THE ROMANOVS.

But although I am always up and ready for something new if it looks like my sort of book,the older I get the more I return to what I have read and loved before and yet have forgotten enough to know a re-read will yield riches. De-cluttering my shelves and de-cluttering my reading. I am now re-reading all of Virginia Woolf ready for the autumn, but also a lot of Dickens and Hardy.  Someone said to me, 'I have never read any Dickens or any Hardy - where shall I start ?' It`s always difficult because I so want to get it right, make them click with both D and H so that they will want read their way through. If this were a young person I would unhesitatingly say GREAT EXPECTATIONS. It is short, it has a young person at the centre and it grabs you from the beginning. Otherwise, begin with the best -BLEAK HOUSE or OUR MUTUAL FRIEND. If you do not see the point of those, Dickens is not for you - they are quintessential Dickens. Where not to begin is a bit harder, but  perhaps A TALE OF TWO CITIES because it is so untypical.  Dickens is best on his own times.

Hardy is easier. Start with the best, whoever you are, and the best is surely THE MAYOR OF CASTERBRIDGE.

So if you are looking for recommedations among the newly published, the prizewinners, the  R and J`s, the top 20, don`t look at me because I haven`t been reading them. 

I`ve been re-reading Chaucer just to see if I still could. I can. It comes back the moment you read a line or two aloud. I can`t say the same about Anglo-Saxon, which is a pity as I loved it as  a student. One winter soon.....

One recommendation for you, though it isn`t new but if you can get hold of a copy, THE MIDDLE AGE OF MRS ELIOT by Angus Wilson. It is one of the best novels ever written about widowhood. Wilson, a man, understands his widowed woman as well as anyone ever could because he had the instinct to know that human is human, feelings are feelings, and in some basic life-situations there is neither male nor female.

When we have finished WOOLF FOR DUMMIES you may like to sign up for my next course, on Elizabeth Bowen. Time everyone re-read her.  She is one of the great 20th century novelists.  BOWEN FOR BEGINNERS ?

The BATTLE FOR GULLYWITH website has an art gallery/slide show. A lot of children have been reading the book and sending in their pictures based on it. The best are being scanned in and the clever boys at Pedalo -well, James at Pedalo to be specific -have now put them up in a wonderful Gallery. Go to

http://www.gullywith.com/your-stories-and-pictures.htm

Click on 'see them here' and then when you have finished looking at one picture, click on it and the next will come up. Aren`t they brilliant ?  If you know any children who would like to send in their own pictures please tell them they will be most welcome and should go to mail@gullywith.com, attached as jpgs.

I think every single one is BRILLIANT.

I had an unpleasant e-mail complaining that I was censoring the comments on this blog. Now, it is my blog and if I wish to censor anything I will. But in fact all I have done is change the filter, after a few comments  came in which were not the sort of thing I wish - or you would wish - to appear. Previously there was a sort of random filter which occasionally witheld comments for my approval. Now every comment waits for my approval but for the record, I have only ever witheld two and if you saw them you would understand why. Most regular bloggers who get a lot of visitors - and this site gets between 900 and 1,500 a day - use the 'withold' filter. I was unusual in not doing so.

But everyone has gone rather quiet of late though the visitor numbers remain the same. Do comment as you always did.. it makes the blog so much more interesting for everyone.

Off with writing pad and pen to chair, table,sun.

Never by me. Rarely does a day go by without my reading a few lines of hers. One of my aims in the de-cluttering of books that has been going on is to end up with 'fewer but better' - better in every way; better writing, better looking but most of all I want to be sure I have everything I possibly could of and by and about far fewer. I won`t go to the lengths of the SP and have rooms packed with books by and about just the one, including his study which runs the whole length of this house. But more Woolf is certainly part of the plan and I have a great deal already. All the novels in various editions, all the non-fiction, the letters, the diaries.. and then there are the books about VW though I neither have nor want anything like all of them. She attracted her share of the deranged, misguided and incompetent critics and commentators. But she has also attracted some of the best; she has been fortunate in her biographers, from Quentin Bell to Joan Bennett, Lyndall Gordon to Hermione Lee and Julia Briggs.

I have had A WRITER`S DIARY beside my bed for 40 years and dip into it at random every day. I know it pretty well by heart I should guess. Today I came upon,  'Why is there not a discovery in life ? Something one can lay hands on and say 'This is it.'

I know what she meant. She had a restless, questing intellect, she knew about so many things - literature of course, centuries of it, then history, politics...yet she never found the thing she sought, never said 'This is it.' But then again, perhaps she did.

I slept in the warmth of the afternoon but worked at my little table outside in the cooling evening and at one point, stopped and looked up and around me. The roses are starting. The Paul`s Himalayan Musk and other great ramblers are studding the trees, and clambering over the roof of the wood barn. The swifts were screaming round. A first wave of baby bluetits were just hatched. One came to perch on arm of my chair. I froze as it sat there quite unfrightened, no bigger than my thumb folded over, tiny bright eye looking round. Then the barn owl flew off. Then the bats came out. The air smelled of cut grass. And I thought I could say then, 'This is it.'  Virginia Woolf was acutely sensitive to her surroundings, especially when she and Leonard were in the country and she walked, she had a garden, and a writing shed at the bottom of it. I`d lay money on her having set down her pen and smelled the air of an evening