If you are ever in a theatre or at a concert and just before curtain up a man in a suit steps nervously onto the stage, you will know that I am somewhere in the audience. The theatre manager will be there to announce that that the big star has a sore throat, a headache or diarrhoea, and someone else will be playing the role tonight. In my presence, the old tradition of The Show Must Go On is suspended for the night. That’s my jinx. You can guarantee that if I’ve paid a fortune for tickets months in advance, the gremlins will strike a production.

It’s not always a bad thing. Just as football matches sometimes come alive when a team is reduced to ten men, the arrival of an understudy on stage can engender a wonderful spirit of goodwill in an audience, and I’ve rarely been disappointed once the performance has got going.

I suppose I should admit that I’ve never actually heard of diarrhoea being used as an excuse. I just wanted to show off that I have at last learned how to spell it, and I will pass the mnemonic on to you now: Dash In A Real Rush Hurry Or Else Accident. Just the sort of thing they should have taught us at school (like doing the 9-times table with your fingers – but that will have to wait for another day).

Anyway, back to Jinxes. My next is a pain for me, but a boon for everyone else. If there is a flying, biting insect within ten miles, it will find me and tuck in for its bloody lunch. When I say that my nearest and dearest benefit from this, I don’t mean that they like to see me pink and scratching, but they all get off Scot free while I provide the feast for the midges.

I must give off some sort of aroma which (I hope) can’t be detected by humans, but which flags me up as a particularly juicy target. Read the rest of this entry »

Describe the place where you write/draw.

I work all over the place. I like to ‘go’ to work, so I often take my laptop off to libraries. When I lived in London, I used the British Library a lot. It’s a wonderful place, worth every penny of tax I have ever paid

Now I live in Scotland, I have been trying out the National Library of Scotland (lovely staff/very uncomfortable chairs), various local libraries and assorted coffee shops.

When I do work at home, I use whichever room is not completely full of rubbish at the time.  We are in quite a state at the moment.  Kitchen work in progress.  Hence the condition of this desk.

I dream of setting up an office in the garden (like Linda Newbery’s). We’ve got the shed, but at the moment it’s full of old bikes, etc.

What is your most treasured possession?

The remains of my favourite Teddy bear, Bobby.  When my dog was a puppy she tore him to shreds, and all I could salvage was the essence of his face.  Here he is, in a frame:

People who come to my house often think this is a rather sinister work of modern art, but in fact this image encapsulates years of unconditional love, shared problems and treasured secrets. Read the rest of this entry »

The blogging homework set by DFB for its authors can be frighteningly specific.  This month we are to write about ships and sailing.  Oh dear. 

I don’t have much experience here, though I feel in my bones that I am a naturally nautical person. I love water.  I’m a pretty good swimmer.  But most of my sailing has had to take place in my imagination. I grew up in central London.  From my block of flats (on a hill in Camberwell) we could hear the foghorns from the River Thames; but I didn’t even set eyes on the sea until I was about 10, and was long grown-up before I went on board a ship.

And yet my love affair boats started young.  We lived within a short train ride of Battersea Park, which in those days had a permanent fun fair including a boating pond.  I thought it was a huge, dangerous expanse of briny, and I never went near it without expecting to drown.  I’ve been back to the site now that the fun fair is long gone, and it’s fairly clear from what remains that the ‘lake’ was tiny, made of concrete, and extremely shallow.  Nevertheless, I felt I was taking my life in my hands whenever my brothers and sister and I stepped gingerly into one of the cute little pastel-coloured paddle boats for our fifteen minutes of fun. 

BATTERSEA FUNFAIR:

Do such boats still exist?  They had pedals like those on bicycles, which, as I recall, you pushed with your hands to make the boat go.  At the end of your session, a man called out “Come in, number 5, your time is up,” and if you failed to respond, he hooked you to the side with a big pole (which gives you some idea of how small the ‘lake’ was, I suppose). Read the rest of this entry »

Making up locations is one of the joys of writing fiction, but sometimes you come across somewhere real that is just perfect as a setting.  And real objects can set you off on a line of storytelling that could never have started in your own brain.

It’s happened to me many times: most recently when I was writing my book Johnny Swanson.  I was investigating the early history of the disease Tuberculosis when I came across a place in Wales called Craig-y-nos.

It’s a castle built mainly in the 19^th century, and in its heyday it was the home of a great opera singer.  But the thing that caught my attention was that it had been used, from the 1920s to the 1950s, as a sanatorium: a special hospital for children with T.B.

I had to go and have a look. Fortunately, the castle was being converted into a hotel, and it was possible to stay there (albeit in a room where you could see down into a courtyard through a hole in the bathroom floor). Read the rest of this entry »

Well! I never expected that one of the best stories of 2011 would come out of The Archers.

Should there be anyone out there who doesn’t know what I’m talking about, The Archers is a Radio 4 soap opera (‘an everyday story of countyfolk’) that has been running since 1951.

The Archers moves at a snail’s pace.  Only those of us who have devoted most of our lives to listening regularly can detect the crucial lines in each episode – and yet you can miss the programme for weeks and still pick up the threads.  We love some of the characters, but the programme’s real contribution to the welfare of the nation is the way in which it provides a safe place for us to hate.  I could never dislike anyone as much as I dislike Helen Archer.  In a curious way, by sucking away at my store of bile, she (and other infuriating characters, such as the vet’s father, Jim Lloyd) make me better able to cope with people I find irritating in real life. Read the rest of this entry »

We’re supposed to be writing about classics – and in a way I am, if only to say that as a child my contact with ‘classic’ books was largely through television.  In those days, when there were only two (black and white) channels, the entire nation sat down on Sunday afternoons to watch dramatisations of the works of Charles Dickens, Jane Austen and so on. I’ll never forget Patrick Troughton as Quilp in The Old Curiosity Shop (long before he was Doctor Who) or Alan Badel as the Count of Monte Cristo.

(This is what our television looked like. It was made by the great British company, Pye. At first we had only one channel to watch, but when I was six we got a special box to put on top, which meant we could tune in to ITV. When the adverts came on, my dad would shout 'blab off!' and we had to turn the sound down so our minds would not be polluted.)

I was very lucky because the BBC seemed to have a gift for putting on whatever book we were studying in English lessons at the time.  As a result I got away with failing to read set books for much of my school career, basing my essays entirely on what I’d seen on the screen.  It’s only as I write this that I realise the teachers might have planned it that way.  Read the rest of this entry »