I have just found five books about books and reading, books and bookshops and book buying, books and book-rooms, on my shelves, without even trying. What is it about these books which has made me buy them ? Why was the latest, THE YELLOW LIGHTED BOOKSHOP by Lewis Buzzbee, irresistible ?

The title, for one. The cover for another. The nice chunky square shape for a third.

Oh come on, Hill, do you buy every book whose title and cover you like, even the ones about Cooking or Wolfhounds ?

There is something strangely seductive about discovering other people`s life-affair with books. How and where did they begin and with what ? Which book hooked them ? What have they read since and why ? What is it like selling books ? Why did this person buy a tiny antiquarian bookstore in the backstreets of a small town in Maine ? Or Hay on Wye ?

The Yellow Lighted Bookshop is a treat, a mixture of autobiography, litero-graphy, goss about writers, love of the physical book, hints on how to work in a bookshop and stay sane. It is a delight from start to finish and no small part of the pleasure is in discovering 1. the books he loves that you love, he hates that you hate and 2. books you have yet to read but thanks to his enthusiasm - and good salesmanship - you now will.

I often dip into Anne Fadiman`s little book of literary enthusiasms, EX LIBRIS, and I have twice read Francis Spufford`s THE BOY THAT BOOKS BUILT.

So inspired by all of them am I that I am starting a little something along not dissimilar lines myself.

Watch this blog.

I think it has to do with coming from Yorkshire and still having what is called up there a pawky (sp ?) sense of humour. I do and I am obviously going to have to learn to curb it, even so late in life. I have upset a load of folk this week by making two straight-faced JOKES in comments on the blogs,

Duncan Fallowell has been in tears and is probably still not speaking to me after taking seriously a joke I made about him in a comment on Madame Arcati`s blog. Now  author Marie Philips's other commenters have exploded about another joke I made on her blog - she often mentions an actor called David Tennant and I sent in a jokey comment telling her, more or less, to get over it.

Everyone has risen in fury. How DARE I tell people how to write their blogs etc etc. For heaven`s sake. I wasn`t. I wouldn`t. Mind you, a lot of people tell me how to write mine. You`d be amazed.

So in public here. THEY WERE JOKES. I WAS JOKING. I am so sorry if I upset Duncan and annoyed Marie and her commenters.

I did not mean to offend, hurt, annoy anyone. But I am now going to desist from any comments on anyone`s blog for the foreseeable. It onlyseems to cause trouble.

I yield to no one in my admiration for Helen Mirren. She has been my heroine for about thirty five years, even since I saw her as Cressida and I banged on for so long about the injustice of her not being made a Dame that they kindly arranged for it to happen. She is wonderful. The best thing she has ever done is on television, not film or the stage, and it was the long-running role of Inspector Jane Tennison - the very last episode of that was moving beyond all, and her final descent into drink and sadness was wonderfully portrayed.

But the Queen. I wonder. I don`t wonder at whether she was good or not because I have not yet seen the whole film, only clips. The SP went and said she was terrific but he was unsure about it as a whole.

So am I because I`m unsure about the rightness of making a film about living people who are in those roles now, today, in real life. I am even more uncertain of the rightness of fictionalizing, dramatizing their time of great sadness and hurt, confusion and distress when Diana died - and do not ever doubt that it was precisely that. It troubles me. How would you feel if you were the Queen ? A blameless woman if ever there was one. Mirren toasted her at the Oscars - well, yes, and as she said, if it had not been for HM she wouldn`t have been standing there in her stunning Christian Lacroix gown at all. Quite. But the gown was amazing. When did Helen Mirren - how odd she and Her Majesty should both be HM - ever put a foot wrong, gown-wise ? I`m not sure which was more wonderful, her Oscars gown or her Baftas one. Both.

But I`m still worried about the film. And it is always fun to watch the previously anti-establishment, anti-royal, rebelllious thesps turn smartly in the opposite direction, when they are offered gongs and get to curtsey.

I hope they give her a really gritty part next, where she gets to escape through barbed wire or wear prison gear in a Russian gulag. Mind you, she could do a mean Margaret Thatcher.

I probably should say 'non-Christian believers'.  A friend who comments here from time to time and is a strongly believing Christian, has given up reading novels for Lent, on the usual grounds that you give up something you really really enjoy, as she does novels, and spend the time, in her case, reading what used to be called Improving Books. Spiritual Reading. I argue with her that when I was at a convent school the money we saved on giving up sweets went to the poor but she can give the money she would have spent on books to them. I also argue that Great Novels ARE spiritual reading. They enrich us profoundly. You could give up chick lit of course. And crime novels.

Meanwhile, perhaps those who are still reading might provide some suggestions for her ? She has Michael Mayne`s books, and I am sending her my two best ideas, H.A.Williams TRUE WILDERNESS and TRUE RESURRECTION, which have sustained me over many a Lent and at other times too.  They appear to be out of print again but I recommend them warmly. Harry Williams was a fun-loving, gin-drinking Chaplain of Trinity College Cambridge in the 1950s, remembered by many for his thespian style, his gin which was always generously dispensed, and for a catastrophic nervous breakdown he suffered while there. One of its symptoms was that he became severely agrophobic and endured private agonies trying to get from one side of the other to the Great Court.

But he found a psychiatrist, and from there underwent the long agony of discovering himself and somehow finding a way to re-assemble the broken parts into a new whole. This led him to become a monk at the Community of the REsurrection in Yorkshire, where he spent the rest of his life. It shocked many of his Society friends, with whom he had enjoyed a high time, but it was the right decision. Out of it all came these two moving books, which have spoken to many in despair, need, anxiety and bewilderment - out in the wilderness in fact. He followed them some years later with another highly revealing book, an autobiography called SOME DAY I`LL FIND YOU.

He wrote so well, so engagingly, succinctly, clearly and from the heart, He never spared his own feelings and he used his painful voyage to help others who found in his writing hope and understanding, explanation and re-affirmation.

Meanwhile, for the start of Lent, I am reading the book by Sheila Cassidy, given to me by Philippa and blogged about by the DGR a short time ago. But I`m not giving up novels.

Or chocolate.

Some of the best have already been taken. I wish I could have any of the following - and as it`s the weekend, let`s have some of your favourites along the same lines.

The Corridors of Power

The Heart of Darkness

The Bonfire of the Vanities

The End of the Affair

The Bride of Lammermoor

OVER TO YOU.

 I need a title for the next Simon Serailler crime novel and I haven`t got one. I like to follow the same formula.. The... of ... ' as n The Risk of Darkness.  I had a title for the one I was writing but that has been abandoned. I would ask for suggestions but I`d have to give away something and I mustn`t do that. So I trawl through dictionaries of quotations and so forth and hope for something to leap out at me.

A good title is worth everything. I have just started a very good new novel called WHAT IS LOST... recommended by the boys at Crockatt and Powell - it is their top seller at the moment, which is especially good news as it is 1. a first novel and 2. comes from a very small publisher. But the title does not grab one, any more than does that of the Charlotte Mendelson novel due out soon, WHEN WE WERE BAD....

Why did A SHORT HISTORY OF TRACTORS IN UKRAINIAN get a kick start, or LOVE, A USER`S GUIDE, or SPECIAL LESSONS IN CALAMITY PHYSICS ? or A WOMAN`S GUIDE TO ADULTERY...?

So, Simon Serrailler`s guide to love in the Ukraine ? or The Calamitous Loves of .. OK, I won`t call you, you call me. But you get the picture ? That`s why I was so pleased when the children`s story I am racing to finish has a title which came to me in a dream. THE BATTLE FOR GULLYWITH.  Why ? What the... ? Who knows but a whole book got woven round it.

I am also thinking of a title for its successor... so far I`ve got THE FOXES OF WITHERN and THE FIGHT FOR WITHERN FOREST.

Hm

I discovered her when I`d run out of Henry James, some years ago and a friend exclaimed in amazement that I had not only never read THE HOUSE OF MIRTH etc but never so much as heard of EW. So I got the H of M and was immersed from page one - and then read everything by her and about her I could find. Oddly enough, I have recommended her enthusiastically to a few people who have come back saying they simly couldn`t take her or see what she was about or.... but only a few and it happens. Most people see the point all right. She is the most perceptive commentator on human relationships, the most revealing writer about early 20th century American society, the best and most subtle novelist of manners and observer of the lives and position of women in society since - well, Henry James. But she is no pale imitator of James, she is her own woman.

The SP kindly bought me Hermione Lee`s long-awaited biography of Edith Wharton for my birthday, but before embarking on it I discovered to my joy a novel - novella, really - which I had not read. I thought I hadgone through the lot and must begin again at beginning. And then I came upon GLIMPSES OF THE MOON. It is a strange and rather chilling tale of two impoverished New Yorkers, Nick and Susy, who find a way to get ahead and make money and have a good time, courtesy of their rich friends, but whose consciences - they did not know they had them - start to get the better of them so that eventually the  best laid plans turn to ashes. (What a curious sentence - do plans turn to ashes ? No, probably not, but it`s late so I hiope you get the gist. Perhaps it is to dust that plans turn. Oh do help me out someone..)

It is a densely written, cunningly wrought and shrewdly told tale and it has made me to to the shelves and put all the Whartons together  - my bookshelves are very unorganised -ready for a complete re-read when I have finished the 12 vols of Anthony Powell.

The biography will follow after.  So that takes care of a day or two, and I am still  enjoying the Dublin crime novels too.

You mean you not yet taken my course, 'How to Read Five Books at a Time.'  Sign up. Discount for Early Birds.

If I had been browsing in a bookshop and come upon THE FOUR COURTS MURDER by Andrew Nugent, I would never have bought it. The cover is beyond hideous. But it was sent to me by the kind publisher, along with his forthcoming book, SECOND BURIAL which is in hardback and has a cover which is just as bad. I am not sure I would even have started to read but I glanced first not at the blurb but at the author biog. And I know what I always say - it doesn`t matter about the author, the author`s life is irrelevant, the book must stand alone. Do as I say not as I do. 'Andrew Nugent is a former practising barrister. He is now a Benedictine monk and prior of Glenstal Abbey, Limerick. '  I knew at once that I wanted to read his book, even without seeing his cheery little Irish face peeping out below a crown of white hair and above a white monastic habit.

I am very glad the author biog persuaded me to start reading TE FOUR COURTS MURDERS because it is just the thing I like and so will you if you can get past the cover. Just put brown paper round it like we did at school. Brother (Father ?) Nugent writes well, intelligently and (occasionally ponderously ) and his setting is the law courts of Dublin, where someone described as a good judge but not a nice man, has been murdered in his chambers. The book buzzes with Irish lawyers, Irish policemen, Irish barmaids, Irish court clerks and  Irish villains and I am enjoying it hugely. I will go straight on to the next and report. Meanwhile,  both are published by Headline, and the new hardback comes out on March 8th.  Good stuff.

Jessica Ruston, who blogs over at The Book Bar and is the author of Heroines has been commissioned to do a book about fund raising  - How Small Charities can raise Big Funds. She is asking if anyone has any tips, suggestions etc on fund -raising - ideas, especially fresh ideas (i.e. not a sponsored marathon/ a cookery book !) and unusual ideas, stories of successful fund raising - even warning stories. (Do NOT try this, we were left out of pocket...)

If you have any suggestions please put them in the comments, or go to her own blog,  ( http://visit.thebookbar.com/blog  ) leave comments etc there. THANK YOU.

I don`t know where to start but I do wish the Education Secretary would spend a day with me going down my e-mails from desperate middle to lower grade 14 year olds. They are trying. They really are. And they are reading I`m the King of the Castle and the Woman in Black, for heaven`s sake - not difficult reads. Not Dickens. Not George Eliot. Not the Brontes. On the whole I am delighted that they enjoy my books but then they come to course work and exams. These young people are not natural readers. They have probably found learning to read at all hard work. They certainly do not come from a background where parents and friends read. And however they write to me, they are sincerely wanting help. They mean well (mostly.) If they are struggling with me, heaven help them and their teachers if they are forced to read Eliot and Dickens. Shakespeare is bad enough. I have no idea why they are being forced through him either. Here is an e-mail I would like the Education Secretary to have to deal with. This young man i 14 and was in terrible trouble over coursework on atmosphere is created in The Woman in Black - not the most difficult aspect of the book. I helped him and I wrote notes for him and I guided him through the book and gave him hints. I did NOT do his work for him. But I could tell he was trying his best. Yesterday I received the following.

 hello agen my corse work was handed back to me and i was told it was all wrong. please can you help me agen as u did help me alot last time i have to do; How does Susan Hill use atmosphere in The Woman in Black on the chapter in the nursery. please do help me asap thank you x 

(I have left his name off the message.)

I will try to help him again but I wonder how far we will get. I have asked him to send me  his coursework and the teacher`s comments as I cannot believe he or she simply said it was 'all wrong.' We need to know more.

A friend of mine teaches 14-16 year old bottom set Comprehensive boys angling. As a hobby. He is brilliant at it and they love it. One boy asked if he had any angling magazines and Chris took him some. He read his way through them, finger under the line, mouthing the words, glued to them because he was passionately interested in the subject. He said he had never read anything - ANYTHING - that he had enjoyed and found interesting until these magazines. Chris has now taken him some angling books and he is immersed in them. But he asked him what he did read and he said nothing, reading was so awful at school. What were they reading in class ? Romeo and Juliet. Do you wonder if boys roam the streets ? (The SP agrees with me. ) So is the poor lad and hundreds like him now going to have to wade through The Mill on the Floss and  Hard Times ? Wonderful, wonderful novels, great books, great reads - well I would say that. But the boy with the angling magazines will not. He would struggle, like my young friend above, with The Woman in Black, though he would probably enjoy the play.

Where is this Secretary for Education coming from ? What is he thinking ? Who has he spoken to ? Not me. Not the teachers. Not those at the coal face. I am desperate for boys like these to find something they can enjoy in books, see some point, so that they may move towards reading for pleasure and enrichment. I try every day to that end. That`s why I spend so much time answering all these bloody e-mails.

The politician has not helped.

Which is a way of saying that the one thing book bloggers do not have as a priority is whether a book is new or not - published last week, next week, last year or 100 years ago, it is all one. Literary editors focus almost exclusively on new books, that is their remit; the trade focuses a lot on what is New New New. But one of the joys of book blogging is this absence of stress on the new. I read and re-read. I pick up something recently published. I embark on the Anthony Powell Dance to the Music of Time sequence, which I will eventually write about here. I re-read a Dickens. I enthuse about a novel to be published in August, a proof copy of which has landed on the mat. Or not. People who read the blogs, who buy or borrow a book because they like the sound of it from what I have written, are not worried about when it was published. There is very little Joneses-keeping-up-with and worrying about the Man Booker list. If the latest Richard and Judy selection sounds up our street we will read it. If we want to tackle Chaucer again, we do.

The book blog has resulted in a new and very refreshing wave of book-focused commentary and, usually, enthusiasm and it is making at least some of the Book Trade wake up to their backlists, to out of print titles, and even bookshops to looking over their shoulders .. in a good way.

The obsession with 'newly published' leads to panic. We can`t read it, stock it, review it, write about it, admit its existence, if it is not a New Title. Some people have to concentrate on those. That is their job. But it is not ours, thank God.

ALL SOLD.

But there will be a similar offer of another of our new books soon.

I have to work myself up. The SP is in London taking the Younger D to the National Portrait Gallery and then to the Wolseley and I am here with the convalescent younger BT. I was planning to write some more chapters of The Battle for Gullywith this afternoon, but I fell asleep.

And so now it is time to do a bit of promotion.

THE GOOD THIEF`S GUIDE TO AMSTERDAM by Chris Ewan.

There, a reminder of the beautiful cover. This is the book that won the Long Barn Books Competition for one  first novel to be published by us this year and I can`t believe my luck in getting it. Chris has already got a top agent, foreign and mass market market paperback deals and film interest and he is writing book 2 in a series about the man called Charlie Howard. Charlie Howard writes caper novels about a burglar. He also happens to be one. In this first novel he is writing about a crime writer who is busy burgling houses in Amsterdam, after meeting a mysterious American who wants him to steal 3 wise monkeys from someone`s house. There is also the matter of the briefcase - not to mention the briefcase-sized hole in Charlie`s plot.

Chris Ewan lives on the Isle of Man and he has just become engaged to Jo, who is a Manx girl through and through. Chris himself comes from Taunton.

Now.. the offer. We publish the book in hardback in May, at a nifty 12.99 - a mean, keen price for a first novel in hardback. BUT, we have a very very limited special offer on it available NOW.

There are just TEN special copies of this book. First edition. First printing. Those are always collectable, especially when the author becomes very very famous. You try and find a first edition first printing of a first novel by Martin Amis,  Graham Greene and, wow, Ian Fleming, for which you do need a re-mortgage.

Not only are we offering a first edition first printing, we have TEN which are not only SIGNED (imagine finding one of those of the above authors...) but in which Chris Ewan has HAND WRITTEN a paragraph from the book. The first FIVE of these come with a very special extra - the details of which I will not divulge. This whole package, if kept carefully, will be something you will be very very glad that you bought.

Actually, I am keeping one for myself to buy me a place in a Rest Home in my old age.

So that leaves only NINE.

The cost of these Special Limited Signed First Edition First Printing copies, with the hand-written paragraph and the EXTRA, is just £30. And of course you get to read the book - handling it very very carefully to make sure you do not devalue it by bending the corners - well in advance of publication. Amaze your friends. Be the envy of your neighbours, are, I believe, the sort of phrases I should use at this point.

This offer is open to visitors to the blog first, well before we put it up on the Long Barn Books website. If there are none left, we never will.

If you would like to grab one of these copies now, please e-mail me and I will give you the address to which to send your cheque.

More exciting book news later.

I said I would bring you more news of the Adventures of a Tiny Publisher. 'The Small Publisher with the BIG reputation,' as Long Barn Books says. We are Ten years old this year. The even tinier firm I founded in 1997 with £500 and a loan of £500 from the SP has grown somewhat though it will never be, because I do not want it to be (at least in my lifetime) a Big Publisher, especially not a Big Publisher with  Small Reputation. I spent ten years doing everything bar the printing and design - editing, selling them or tryng to, packing the books, despatching them doing the accounts, and it was fun and hard work and a steep learning curve. It was also far, far too time consuming. Now we are distributed by HarperCollins, who do the packing the accounting, and we are sold in by Reps too, so I can concentrate, apart from writing my own books, mending broken Border Terriers and looking after the SP, on choosing and editing books. I get the best part. I also have the wonderful Editorial Board behind me to advise and sustain and save me from myself. I told you about one -new-member of the Ed Board yesterday. The others are Scott Pack, he of the Big Mouth, formerly Buying Manager at Waterstones, now heading up The Friday Project. You would think that Scott and I, as small publishers, would be rivals but we are not. What TFP do is very different from with LBB does and if it ever does come to a conflict of interests the whole thing will be settled amicably - i.e. I will win.

There is also Caroline Mileham, Buying Manager of Borders, which is very much Our sort of Chain, and she is a VIP in that world. Her quiet, thoughtful advice and information on the retailing side of things is absolutrely invaluable.

Then there is Lynne Hatwell, known to all as The Dove Grey Reader, bringing her immense breadth and depth of reading experience all the way from Devon. Lynne represents the Customer. The Consumer. The Book lover, reader, buyer. To some extent, of course, so do we all. But Lynne`s focus is direct, and her mind is not cluttered with stuff about projected sales and printer`s estimates, only with stuff about sock-knitting and quilt sewing and Breastfeeding newborn infants.

Our other Board Member is my Assistant and co-Director Jessica Ruston, who is the author of HEROINES, and is writing two other books, does the Publicity for LBB, and is a addicted reader and book buyer. She is the youngest board member. She blogs at The Book Bar.

So that is us. We`re a good cross-section of interests and of expertise and we are an absolute POWERHOUSE of ideas.

The next instalment will bring you the exciting news of the next books coming from LBB.

You can`t wait.

London. Border Terriers, visits/injuries to, please delete where necessary.

Quick update on the junior BT.. we don`t know how and I won`t go into dreadful sickening details but she managed to rip off a pad and a claw on the front leg and  what the SP called her driver`s side. Borders are very stoical little dogs, they never whine and complain but she came into my room on 3 legs holding one up and trembling from head to foot. Nuff said. We have magnificent vets and there is now a new young Scottish one in the practice, called Graeme,( who calls all male animals with whom he deals 'sir' ) and he was  wonderful with little Dandy, who spent a day and a night with them, had an anaesthetic and an operation and returned with a dinky little bandage and special boot on her  foot. The SP looked after her well during my absence in the Smoke and she is now spending half her time asleep and the other half patiently trying to remove the dinky bandage. Phew. One lives nine lives through one`s children and one`s animals and I feel Border Terriers have used up most of my spares now.

London. We had the Long Barn Books Editorial Board meeting which is always a serious and hard-working occasion and also a gastronomic one, in the private room of Green`s Restaurant in St James`s, where the pain of our deliberations, seriousness and hard work is eased not only by a splendid lunch but by the enjoyment we enjoy watching Scott Pack firstly go through the pudding menu pretending he might have something other than the sticky toffee pudding before we watch the beatific expression on his face as he eats his sticky toffee pudding. It`s sweet actually and those of you who know Scott will be able to picture that beatific face.

We had a new member of the Ed Board to introduce yesterday, Ion Trewin, one of the Most Important Figures in the UK Book World and who I have known man and almost boy since 1972. The SP knew his father, too, the celebrated and long-time theatre critic J.C. Trewin.

Ion and I  met when we sat next to one another at another lunch all those years ago, when I was receiving the Whitbread Award for Fiction. The lunch - as it always eas then - was in the old Whitbread Brewery Offices in the city, when they still had their drey horses which pulled the beer around London stabled next door. Sounds positively Dickensian, for only thirty five years ago. Ion was then a humble Diarist on The Times. We sat at a round table with  Lady Antonia Fraser as was the, now Pinter, who was fair and queenly and utterly charming, the Biography winner, James Pope Hennessy, who was incredibly nice to me and who was murdered by some low-life queer thug shortly afterwards. And Harold Macmillan. So there. HM was charming too and dominated the table effortlessly, in the way only a former PM and G.O.M can.  He was presenting the Awards. He presented me with an engraved silver box which is on my writing table as I speak, and a cheque for £1,000 which is at least £10,000 in today`s money and made me solvent again and remain solvent for some time to come. I lived off its proceeds while I wrote In the Springtime of the Year.

Ion is now Chairman of the Man Booker Prize and recently retired Major Publisher and Chair of the Cheltenham litfest and heaven knows what else, VIP, and not changed a bit. He always beamed benevolently even when he was a lad.

Long Barn Books, my small publishing company has great publishing plans for the rest of 2007 and even more for 2008. I plan to reveal the plum of our 2008 list to you later, complete with photograph.

We live in stirring times, Jeeves.

Two business days in London and horrible injury to younger smaller Border Terrier who is fine now but crises to the right of us, crises to the left of us.

Proper blog later.......

Simon Gray I mean. You see, as the Desk Sergeant says to my friend who is a duty Solicitor, 'Right, now what it is, is this..'

I  have read 3 books in a row which did not please. I did not even finish THIS BOOK WILL CHANGE YOUR LIFE, sadly, as I found it terminally boring. Mea culpa, not its, I am sure. R and J cannot be wrong and they generally aren`t.

I dumped it in favour of a Spanish novel in translation, which has been revered, not to say idolised, in Spain and elsewhere over Europe, where they take their literature seriously. It ticked the following boxes. 1. Published by Pushkin Press, who rarely disappoint. 2. With a brilliant, if gloomy, cover. 3. About a woman living in a remote castle  in Portugal and a man who tried to bring electricity to remote villages so weird, unusual, about Castles, think EMBERS I thought. 4. There is a photograph of the young novelist in the book and he has looks to die for. Relevant ? No.

So I began reading AGUA It is one of those novels which tell  and do not show but I am happy with that, many of the great novelists have told not shown and I always think the advice to aspiring novelists to show not tell is unsound. It all depends.

But I faltered and I rallied myself and in the end I got through it but it was hard work and I felt as if I had been trudging for hours across a long hot dusty plain.

Foolishly, I then turned to another novel from Pushkin. Not that it is usually foolish, I like their books but A LIFE by ITALO SVEVO is terminally depressing, shrouded in gloom and ending in suicide. It nearly did me in too.

So you can imagine with what a heavy heart I opened a new parcel of new books, expecting more misery, gloom and European suicides, since I had clearly been tempted by any number of these.

What fell out first was ENTER  FOX, by Simon Gray, the only Diary of his I had not, for some bizarre reason, read. And let joy be unconfined, my sombre mood was swept away with a couple of pages of SG`s customary gloom, self-ridicule and hypochondria as I caught up again with George and Errol, Tom and Harry, Harold and Antonia and Victoria, some of whom are dogs and cats. The account of the first night of SG`s play in Watford, and of how it came to be there, via rejection by others who should have Known Better is as wonderful as ever. So is the account of a boat trip up the Thames to Greenwich. So is.. no, just buy it, just read it.

The SP just came home at the usual time which always catches me in my bath. Lately, he has wandered in with his first glass of wine to find me sunk into the water in gloom and European near-suicide but tonight he could hear the hysterical laughter before he got to the bottom of the stairs. I think he feared that if I had not found a new Simon Gray before long, he would have found me drowned in a sea of Joe Malone-scented water.

I am starting two at once. The first was suggested a blog by regular commenter and Woolf for Dummies star pupil, Curzon Tussaud. She asked for 'I can cope with everything so long as I have...'

And I am also putting up, 'I am a sucker for....'

The first is easy, 'I can cope with anything so long as I have my own bed.' I took it as my luxury the second time, non-swanks, I went on Desert Island Discs.

and I am a sucker for..

Sending text messages to try and win stuff, most usually the Grazia Magazine goodie bag. Grazia is  one of my weekly indulgence mags. (I dare not admit to the other..) and they have a really ace Goodie bag offer every week on the back page. Cost of text message all goes, always, to an excellent charity, so no guilt even attached. I text and text and text for the Goodie bag. Never win. Any minute now I`m going to start an 'It`s a fix' whinge. .. It`s who you know/if your sisters works in magazines/if you`re a model/live in London/don`t live in Gloucestershire/are gay/

Members of this family have a very good track record in this sort of comp. The elder daughter won a nice lot of La Perla lingerie, the Younger Daughter is ALWAYS wins tickets for concerts right and left..always flippin'winnin'..

I think it`s a fix.

The Olympic Gold Medal-winning long jumper Jonathan Edwards has long been known as much for his Born-Again extreme evangelical Christian beliefs as for his jumping.

Now it appears that he has lost his faith. Jonathan Edwards no longer believes in God. He stopped believing just after he won his Olympic gold,

Now there`s gratitude for you.

Picking up on a few bits in this morning`s over-the-coffee rag.

Peter Hain says that City workers who get bonuses of 1million and more should be required to give a large percentage of the money to charity. I don`t think anyone should be required to give to charity, let alone by a government. Or rather, correction, they should be required - by their own consciences. It is obscene that some people make several million pounds in bonuses, however hard they work. And it is what they do with the money that is the point. In the right hands a lot of money is a wonderful thing. Look at Jamie OLiver who gives not merely money, which would be easy, but his time and creative energies, helping young men and women who have done poorly at school and lost their way since, get a training and a future. They will not all be Great Chefs - some of them won`t take advantage of Jamie`s help - but many of them will succeed in having good jobs, interesting careers, and great pride. That is how to spend a fortune.It was my own MIS fortune to have to visit the 'farm' of some people not far away who bought it - at an over-inflated price- with a City bonus. They spoke of nothing, NOTHING, but how much money they had and what they had bought and how much it cost. They had not two cars - one each - but FIVE,  including 2 Porsches, not one swimming pool, but TWO, one inside one out, not one holiday home but THREE, not one boat, but Two, not one bathroom with gold plated taps, but FIVE.  Their children are dressed entirely 'designer' as she told me not once but.....

They decided to go in for riding - never having ridden; they bought four horses at an average of around eighty thousand pounds each - the people who sold them  saw them coming - and a horse box which is bespoke and cost £185,000. The children`s 3 ponies and riding gear cost another  100K. They bought new bespoke saddles which cost  around 30K each.. and so on and so on. They so reminded me of the Veneerings in Our Mutual Friend. But the general impression was one not only of extreme greed, but of narrowness of outlook and poverty of spirit. Their attitude towards anyone less fortunate than themselves, anyone in Africa, anyone homeless, anyone in any kind of need, was 'we`ve made all this by our ow efforts, why don`t they ?'

On the opposite page from the report on City bonuses was a small paragraph about research into the situation of a great swathe of the elderly across the country. It seems that because of the huge rise in fuel costs without any consequent rise in pensions and allowances, very many people over 75 now have to choose between 'eat and heat.'  Literally. Disadvantaged young people have time on their side and a chance of a future. The majority of the frail poor elderly do not. Tell that to the City bonus-boys.. how could you buy 5 cars between 2 of you, at an average cost of £80,000 per car, knowing that someone in a village a mile away either ate or was warm but not both ?

Oh, and I also read someone saying how difficult it is to give money away. Excuse me ? Remember the man in America who used to hand out $100 notes to people he thought looked as if they needed them ?

And if you don`t trust most charities, for God`s sake trust the Salvation Army. Their theology may be a bit dodgy, but they do an inestimable amount of practical good, day in and day out - not to mention their brass bands.

The evidence would seem to be that once it is announced that a publisher has paid a massive amount in advance for a novel, readers don a special resistance-to-hype garment. They like to discover things for themselves, tell one another about them, not have books pushed in their faces with 'Make me a Best-seller' screaming at them in huge type. John Murray paid half a million pounds for Michael Cox`s THE MEANING OF NIGHT and I was delighted because Michael deserved and needed the money. But there was resistance to the book from that moment on and it cannot conceivably make back its advance. The same thing happened with THE THIRTEENTH TALE - for which another publisher overpaid to the tune of 800,000 for heaven`s sake. And where is that now, at least in the UK ? Done all right, but there has been a lot of consumer resistance.

And then along came THE GLASS DREAMS of the - oh you know. I think a lot of people would have enjoyed discovering this pastiche cum romp for themselves. But Penguin immediately not only overpaid for it but spent a cool £125,000 on publishing it in instalments first and having a masked ball to launch it and heaven knows what all. I have seen almost no review coverage for it but there was one in today`s Sunday Times which was distinctly sniffy. Reviewers are counter-suggestible when it comes to hype as well.

None of these are bad boks, though none is great literature  - but then, none set out to be anything but good popular fun. Nothing wrong with that. But when people are complaining about the overpayment for celebrity memoirs, they might look at overpayment and over-hype for a rew novels. All the great successes in fiction of recent years - and certainly all the surprise ones - have come about because of word-of-mouth, with the odd prize thrown in. ( Apart from anything chosen by Richard and Judy.) No one overpaid for A Short History of Tractors or The Curious Incident  or Cloud Atlas or even, the first time around, Harry Potter.

I don`t mean authors should be bought on the cheap. Well I wouldn`t mean that would I ? But hype and silly advances do not work and they do not work not because of anything intrinsically wrong with the books but because readers get a certain amount of gleeful pleasure from resisting the over-hyped  ones on principle. Which, if you think about it, is rather unfair to the authors. Unsurprising. But still unfair.

I have read most of John Banville`s novels. Some I have liked/admired, others not. Par for most courses. I have not yet read his first crime novel, Christine Falls, but I will because I am always interested when literary novelists turn to crime, for obvious reasons. The SP will bring Sunday papers home, so of course I end up by reading bits of them, and in today`s Sunday Times, John Banville explains what made him  begin writing crime novels - mainly an admiration for other crime novelists, especially Agatha Christie and Parker. But he is fretting and really he has no need. Firstly he asks why he ventured into an area of fiction ' where so many masters already rule. Was it hubris or folly or both ?'

Neither. If we never did what someone else had already done better than we ever could, we would never do anything, If a thing is worth doing it is worth doing badly. ( By which I do not mean to imply that I expect Banville`s crime novel to be bad - quite the contrary.)

He then frets on by asking himself the fatal question,  ' Is it art ?'  He adds ' that is not for me to say.'  No, but the very fact that he asks it reveals 1. that he suspects that it is not and 2. that it matters to him. It should not. Who said even artists have to produce art all the time and only art ? For heaven`s sake .. he frets to the end. ' If it is art is it so by accident ?'  Fortunately, in the nick of time, he comes to his senses and, I hope, stops fretting.  He says 'What does it matter, art or otherwise ?'

(It doesn`t.)  and ends up in common sense territory at the last gasp...

'For oh, dear, what fun  I am having.'

But why 'oh dear' ?

Come on JB, it`s fine to have fun. It really is. Honest.

Thank God he catches himself in time.

All students.. if you can get hold of one, I do recommend for your enjoyment and interest and for excellent general VW background, a book called

BLOOMSBURY PIE. The Making of the Bloomsbury Boom by Regina Marler. Virago.

It is extremely informative on the modern cult of Bloomsbury out of which I have been trying to carve our path of appreciation of Virginia`s work.

Our next book is MRS DALLOWAY. Please read. But please put  right out of your minds THE HOURS, film and book.

In 1986, when I was presenting the Radio 4 book programe, Bookshelf, I went to interview a lady, then in her 90s, whose name was Joyce Dennys. She had written some articles for a magazine during the war, and illustrated them with witty drawings, and when I met her they had just been published in 2 books called HENRIETTA`S WAR and HENRIETTA ON THE HOME FRONT. They have been among my favourite comfort books ever since and they are out of print. I would love everyone to enjoy them as much as I have and I want to bring them out again, with drawings, under the Long Barn Books imprint. But I cannot find out who the copyright holders are. Joyce Dennys had a daughter, with whom she was living, but as she was married the name will be different. I have written to her old publishers but no one there knows anything as the firm has merged with others since.

If anyone knows anything about Joyce Dennys`s family, so that I can be in touch, please let me know. Otherwise, I will simply re-publish the books and put a reqiuest in them for the copyright holders to come forward and be paid. But it would be nice if they could be traced first.

Meanwhile, if ever you come upon second hand copies, snap them up. This picture of life during the war among a small middle class community in Budleigh Salterton, with young people away fighting, the Home Guard in action, the seafront draped in rolls of barbed wire, and everyone being in a blackout and with rationing while keeping their Spirits Up, not only present a very accurate picture of how it really was, but an extremely funny one. The characters of Henrietta, her hard-working GP husband (Joyce Dennys`s husband as a doctor ) and the stalwart Lady B, not to mention The Conductor (of the choir) and others, are as rich, humorous, varied, touching and bracing as any I know, outside of the Great Classics.

Go out and rush around in deep snow for a couple of hours with your friend... come in.. eat a big bowl of Pedigree chum and then lie on the kitchen sofa.

Sleep guaranteed.

I don`t buy newspapers now apart from my Daily Mail-over-coffee-fix but flushed with success as I was by having negotiated the drive and the roads this morning that I celebrated by buying not just the DM but a couple of trashy magazines and THE TIMES as well. Having returned safely without need of the blankets, torch, shovel, Kendal Mint Cake, St Bernard or Brandy Bottle, I settled down to read the Thunderer. And a whole page on HOW TO SURVIVE THE BRITISH WINTER. Here we go then. I quote and I kid you not.

'Hot drinks and hot soups are brilliant ways to keep warm.'  by The Times nutritionist.

'Don`t plant anything at the moment,' from their Gardening expert.

'Thermal underwear, even long johns, can be bought  from Primark or Marks and Spencer.'   from the Fashion Writer.

'If your windscreen mists up try a quick blast of your aircon to clear it.'  By an AA patrolman who also says, of course, don`t go out 'unless your journey is really necessary.'

on Heat and Water, the Times technical officer says ' If the weather conditions defeat the best of preventive measures, turn everything off and (- wait for it -) call a plumber.'

They called in the DG of Age Concern to say ' The obvious ways for older people to stay warm are dressing well with several layers of clothing and making sure their home is warm enough.'

and finally, the Times wildlife expert tells us that ' if you have a bird table or some hanging feeders, it is good to keep them well stocked.'

No really. Do you know, I thought that I should drink cold drinks an deat ice cream, that you bought long johns from B and Q,  that it was safer to leave my windscreen misted over, I called an electrician if my pipes were frozen, that I should wear a bikini in the house and the turn the heating off and that I ought to make sure the bird feeders were completely empty.

And they wonder why I don`t buy their newspapers.

Being snowed in yesterday I had a bit of a sort out of some bookshelves and unearthed things I had forgotten I owned, as you do. Among them was Anthony Powell`s  series Dance to the Music of Time, so I got down the first book, A QUESTION OF UPBRINGING and decided I would embark on a re-read of the whole lot. I haven`t read a series or a saga for a long time and it is what I feel like.

What else is there ? Trollope`s Barchester and Political novels of course. Arnold Bennett`s masterly - and underrated and under-read Clayhanger novels. I wonder if The Forsyte Saga would stand up now ? I may dig out my copy and see.

Too many sagas have been poorly written - no need to name names, we all know which I mean. But my mother swore by sagas - Mazo de la Roche anybody ? - because she said she could lose herself in one with the added pleasure of knowing that she had many others to come.

Elizabeth Jane Howard wrote a family saga a few years ago. It was rather good and had a rather bad TV adaptation.

It is something I have often thought I might like to write - though in a sense the Simon Serrailler crime novels are also, and rather inadvertently, family sagas of a sort.

After I have done today`s writing and  taken the dogs out into the snow I am going to settle down by a roaring fire with Anthony Powell. As it were.

This is a question without any pre-conceived idea behind it.

How many people have bought and read ANY self-published book, fiction or non ?

Please add your comments.

It`s most exciting. I will go and take a photograph for you later but at the moment the blizzard is still raging. When I went to bed it was bitterly cold and the air made my face sting as I leaned out of the window but when I looked out again at half past three it had changed. A wind had got up, it was slightly warmer and the snow had begun. When the SP brought my first mug of tea he reported at least 2 inches and rising. He valiantly went out to make sure the nut holders were all accessible for the birds and noted a merry swarm of blackbirds and fieldfares feasting off the fallen apples we always leave for them. The dogs rushed out, got the shock of their lives and rushed back in to the aga again. Our neat little ginger and white cat Tallulah picked her way fastidiously through the snow on prinking paws to find a bit of bare earth - success behind the tool shed.

And I am here with the last third of THE BATTLE FOR GULLYWITH to write, and the four books I am reading simultaneously ( it drives the SP mad..) which are

LONDON. A PILGRIMAGE by Blanchard Jerrold and Gustav Dore

A LIFE. by Italo Svevo

AQUA by Eduardo Berti

and THIS BOOK WILL SAVE YOUR LIFE by A.M. Homes which I am finding boring and will probably abandon before long.

Fridge and freezer are well stocked though I am keeping my eye on the milk situation. But I daresay we`ll be outta here by tomorrow. Never lasts. Now when I was a child wearing clogs in North Yorkshire.....

The Nancy Drew Mysteries

Biggles

Billy Bunter at Greyfriars school

The pony novels of the Pullein Thompson sisters

The Famous Five and the Secret Seven and the Mallory Towers books

Angela Brazil school stories

Goosebumps

And so on. There are yards more. They are the books generations of children read by torchlight under the bedclothes, in the years BP ( you can work it out.) They are the books we could not get enough of, which our parents and teachers thoroughly disapproved of, which were confiscated - they replaced them with Children's Classics like Heidi. But we read on in secretly and the joy and absorption and fun those books gave us led us to become readers, to seek the magical experience of opening a new book and falling head first into it, the books that set us off on the road.

I love to see a child curled up immersed in a book in that way. Whatever the book, if it leads to the love that lasts a lifetime, it gets my vote. It is a Great Book. It is Influential.

Here in the UK a publisher paid far too much for a book by an English first-time novelist called THE THIRTEENTH TALE by Diane Setterfield and will be putting their burned fingers in cold water for a long time to come. But meanwhile, the US publisher was laughing all the way to the bank when the book was chosen as their top book by the Barnes and Noble chain and leaped straight to the top of the NYT best seller lists.

Meanwhile, Barnes and Noble had NOT chosen a book called THE INTERPRETATION OF MURDER by a US novelist, for which the publisher had paid far too much money. Burned fingers being dipped in cold water.

But the UK publisher of the book is laughing all the way.... as it was chosen by Richard and Judy and so leaped to the top of every best seller list.

I just have a feeling there is room for some sort of swap around here if only I could work out what.

 'i was just writting to you to say that although i did not understand parts of your book, i found it overall a thouroughly good read. This is going to be my exam text this year, any tips for the exam????'

I might be able to answer better if you told me which book you were studying. I`m delighted you have enjoyed it whichever one it is.

But tips for the exams are the same whichever book you may be studying.

Read it slowly and carefully. There is NO substitute for knowing the text well.

Take the parts you don`t understand - copy them or highlight them... and ask your teacher straightforward questions about them. He/she should explain for you. But read carefully again before you do and all may become clear.

Don`t rush at things, don`t panic. And get a good night`s sleep beforehand.

Good Luck.

I have received the following question tonight from a student.

'I am writing an essay at the moment on the woman in black, and im completely confused. What techniques did u use in the beginning two chapters of the novel, and how did you draw the readers in  ? '

This exactly illustrates what worries me about how English Literature is taught and what students are led to believe. The answer is I didn`t 'use techniques' - I wrote a story. That is what novelists do. They don`t - well, I certainly do not - think of using techniques. What you have to do is read the chapters and see how it works.

You also have to decide for yourself, as you are the reader, how you are 'drawn in' to the story. How ? How does any writer draw the reader in to a story - or not ? By use of suspense. By use of dialogue. By creating atmosphere. By having cliff-hanging chapter-endings which make you want to know what comes next. By grabbing the attention from the beginning. Any of these. The reader must decide which work and in a particular book. Or not.

But never think the writer does anything other than write a story. I am drawn into books myself every single day - but I never really know why or how. And why or how other books do not so draw me. So often it is a matter of personal taste. Sometimes the opening sentence does it. You can`t stop reading on from it.

You shouldn`t be confused. The reason people usually are is because they rush at things and because they try to get hold of everything all at once. Take each chapter, go through it slowly and carefully, with a notebook and pen, and work out what is happening, what the author is doing, what your reactions as the reader are and why. You will learn as much from observing yourself as you will from asking me. Probably a lot more.

Good Luck.

1. Which theatre in Southwark opened in 1592 ?

2. In which novel did Mr Scogan tell fortunes at a charity fair ?

3. What was National Velvet`s surname ?

4. What was the 'light on the locks of Myfanwy' ?

5. What did Aunt Jobiska make her nephew drink ?

6. Who twisted a tonsil singing at a wedding ?

7. Who wrote 1. The Magic Toyshop and 2. The Moving Toyshop

8. Who 'lived on crispy pancakes from the yellow tide foam ?'

9. Who wrote the original Hotel Babylon ?

10. Who stayed at the Hotel Claremont?

11.  Whose cafe was sad and whose restaurant was at the end of the universe ?

12. What was St Agnes Eve ?

answers on Thursday so you have plenty of time and remember, those who Google only cheat themselves.

Another of those pointless lists which will whizz round the blogs in a nano second. Richard Charkin says it has been cooked up by World Book Day to celebrate its 10th anniversary. Why ? Anyway, let`s get it over with. Here are my 10

In no particular order.

1. Charles Dickens. Bleak House.

2. The Bible

3. The Book of Common Prayer (1662)

4. Virginia Woolf. A Writer`s Diary

5. Nancy Mitford. The Pursuit of Love

6. John Donne. Collected Poems

7. Graham Greene. The End of the Affair

8. P.G. Wodehouse. The Mating Season

9. Lewis Carroll. ALice in Wonderland/Through the Looking Glass.

10. Anthony Trollope. The Way we Live Now.

I have ignored the Times Atlas and the A-Z of London and all those books of course we can none of us do without but which don`t quite count for me as Books.

I daresay some people would include a cookery book.

A merry looking crew at my birthday lunch... from left to right, the SP, Judi Dench, the elder daughter and the younger daughter... It was a riot from start to finish, which cheered up not only our table but the whole pub on a freezingly foggy day. We ate well and I did the mega-embarassing thing I have always promised them I would never, ever do - and took this photograph of them all in a crowded public place. But at least I didn`t do something even worse and ask strangers at another table if they would take it so I could be in it too. I have restraint.

Until the SP`s roast chicken dinner is ready - all part of my treat-weekend- I present you with a couple more pictures from the book Long Barn publishes in the autumn. It now has a title, CHIPPING CAMPDEN : A COUNTRY WAY OF LIFE and though it will have a bit of text from me, Betty Stocker`s photographs are the whole point. They are stunning, as you see. These were taken last winter but it was pretty much like that here this morning.

There may not be a blog until tomorrow night. Both girls are about to arrive home, very kindly, as we have a birthday in the house tomorrow and my treat is to have lunch in my favourite pub with my favourite 4 people in all the world - the SP, the two girls, and Judi Dench.

I will report on what we all ate and drank and stuff later.

Firstly, the free copies kindly sent by Little Brown of the Lyndall Gordon biography of VW are in and I am posting three out tomorrow to 3 requestees. One left and up for grabs.

Secondly, I hope everyone has now read and inwardly digested A ROOM OF ONE`S OWN. Please now read anything VW herself wrote about the background to it, in her Diaries and Letters; and read the relevant pages of both Gordon and of Hermoine Lee`s biography. There is also an extremely useful and relevant paperback in a generally useful series. VIRGINIA WOOLF: AUTHORS IN CONTEXT. by MICHAEL WHITWORTH - OUP.

As you know, I often say that a writer`s life is not especially or necessarily relevant to the work but in VW`s case this is not true. Not only did she have an extremely interesting life, not only was she an extraordinarily interesting and varied human being - she was also someone who was very aware of her own times and especially of the situation of women in them, both privileged women like those of her own circle, and women in general, who deserved better than they customarily got. She thought a great deal about this and she had a lively conscience. As a woman who had not even been to school in the midst of a circle of male relatives and friends who had all been both to school and, generally, university, she was acutely aware of the gulf between them that an education and lack of one, made. VW was a highly intelligent and well-read woman and she undoubtedly would have benefitted from the rigours of a gopod school and university education, as they were then.

It is against this background as well as against the situation of bright women of her times, that we need to read A ROOM OF ONE`S OWN, and not against our own situation.

It is a short book and it appeals to the mind, the conscience, the sense of justice and also to the heart. It packs a punch and it was one of the strongest weapons provided in the battle for women to have an education, to have suffrage, and to have - well, a room of their own.

I am told by Madame Arcati that there are to be not one but TWO new books of interviews by Duncan Fallowell (see post below) coming up.

Good.

It doesn`t look as if he has done any of the subjects I suggested for him though, so he has plenty to be getting on with and I thought of a whole lot more possible interviewees in my bath tonight.

Good interviewers, yes. Bad ones - oh my goodness yes. The worst crime they can commit, and believe me they committ it all too regularly, is not to have done their homework. I had a very well-known interviewer come to see me and his first words were 'I haven`t read ay of your stuff, just fill me in.' The next crime is for the interviewer to use the piece not to reveal their subject but to show off - look at me, listen to me, aren`t I clever ?

Few interviewers could be called great. Lynne Barber is and in a very different way, so was my much-missed friend Lynda Lee Potter.

What makes a great interviewer ? Of course they must write well and hold one`s interest and attention. That goes without saying. But the absolute sine qua non is the ability to reveal the subject, or perhaps allow them to reveal themselves would be more accurate so that the reader feels they have been there, met them, know them. It is also absolutely essential to be able to explore the weaknesses, the vanities, the pomposities - without merely doing a hatchet job. Hatchet jobs are easy, anyone can do them and those who do usually have an axe to grind.

If a subject is evasive, pompous, economical with the truth, putting on a front, if s/he is flirtatious, warm, cold, funny, bitchy, generous, mean, vain.. all of that needs to be revealed without merely being stated.

Not many great interviewers then. Indeed no. But I have discovered one and those who know him and his work will all howl, of COURSE and we could have told you and everything else annoying. But as I have remarked here before and as is worth repeating, one cannot have read or know everything and isn`t it a good job there are some books and writers and now an interviewer, left to discover or old age would be very dull.

What ? Oh, sorry. I am talking about Duncan Fallowell. By a very roundabout route, with the details of which I would not dream of boring you, I have discovered two very fine books indeed by Mr Fallowell, one read, one begun - and I can tell it is fine even after a couple of dozen pages, just as I can usually tell the opposite.

But it is his book of interviews, 20TH CENTURY CHARACTERS, which has added zest and sparkle to the last twenty four hours. It is a boring title for such a completely un-boring book. I got my copy 2nd hand in that source of many good books, The Age Concern shop. Written in the fly leaf in pencil is 'Excellent Book. Recommended.'

Indeed. He interviews at considerable length, which always helps, and one or two subjects are less interesting than the rest. But as for the interviews with Graham Greene, R.D. Laing, Christopher Isherwood, Anthony Powell and probably tops, Mary Soames - they`re genius. The latter is the most wonderful interview I have possibly ever read. It made me know her and it made me love her. How he manages to set down her wonderful stream-of-consciousness conversation is beyond me.

He is very good on the 11th Duke of Devonshire, (Andrew) too.. he gets him spot on, his mannerisms, his extreme politeness, the way he walked and talked, his generosity, his quirkiness. He is good at interviewing husbands and wives when the wife hovers, there but not entirely so - Violet Powell, Peter Quennell`s gushing fifth wife. He is sharp and kind and scalpel-like at the same time, and we sense that he is there but he never obtrudes. A good book of interviews is as absorbing as a Diary or a collection of Letters. I wish there were more. I jolly well wish there were more from Duncan Fallowell. I hope he gets stuck into the 21st century.

Here are some proposals for him.

Peter Maxwell Davies  David Hockney Andrew Parker Bowles Debo Devonshire Terence Conran Andrew Lloyd Webber  Harold Pinter Richard Dawkins Rowan Williams Elton John The Prince of Wales  Lucien Freud

If he gets under the skin of that lot, he`ll be doing well.

.. about the tortoise called Few. (Or possibly, Phew.) The two young sons of the some friends came into the house one day  some years ago carry a tortoise and said he had been given to them by the old lady next door who was going into a home. And that she had said his name was Few.

The parents thought this was so unusual they checked.

Turned out that as she was handing him over to the boys she had said

'For you.'

When we first moved to the cottage with the Magic Apple Tree, the SP decided we needed a tortoise. As you do. So we went to the petshop and bought one.  As could in those days. He was called Theodore but he came to a sad end about which you do not want to know, so in the very last batch of tortoises ever imported (legally anyway) we found Clarabelle and she lived a happy and contented life in a fairly large and quite interesting - for tortoises - garden from which she could not escape. When we moved here we sold the house to some old friends but we did not sell Clarabelle. She is on permanent loan. If she had come here she would have vanished in half an hour. At the magic Carol service in Oxford just before Christmas we met the friends and before we asked about their children and grandchildren, we asked about Clarabelle. She is fine and every year when she emerges safely from hibernation they raise a glass. As we used to. They have promised that if ever they move - which they almost certainly won`t - they will consult us about Clarabelle.

It is almost impossible to KNOW a tortoise but we got to know someof her ways. She can see red food placed on the grass - a tomato or a strawberry, yards away. She likes to clamber over the rockery. And now, apparently, she sometimes likes to go into the kitchen and have a wander round, as if looking for something. She does it quite regularly.

I had an encounter with many tortoises when I went to Saltwood Castle, Kent, to do some filming. Saltwood was owned by Sir Civilisation Kenneth and then by his son of Diaries fame, Alan, and Alan came out to ask if the film crew were happy and needed anything before vanishing into some nether realm of the castle. I was hanging about, as you do most of the time in those circs. and Alan Clarke came up to me. 'You look bored,'  he said. 'Go and count the tortoises.'

So I did. I got to, I think, thirty two, before I was called and I am sure the ground of Saltwood Castle held a good many more, living a happy, roaming sort of tortoisey life.

You cannot get tortoises now so Clarabelle and the others are precious.

I cannot claim to have put the tortoises into THE BATTLE FOR GULLYWITH, in which book they play such a vital and major role. Their presence is entirely down to my five year old co-author, Martha Eleni Pack, who created them for me.

It was her Dad, Scott, who told me that you could adopt a tortoise, well virtually anyway, at London Zoo. And do you know, when the book is finished, I really think I may celebrate by just doing just that.

Here is the link.

http://www.zsl.org/shop/london-zoo-adoptions/adopt-an-egyptian-tortoise-at-london/product.html