I FOUND  myself the other night a sleepless guest in a house with a great deal of ambient nocturnal light. It came from two high street lamps, neighbours’ security lights and a lot of passing traffic …

My friend’s glazed front door was simply astonishing, a glowing blaze of fiery light which I found hypnotic. Sleepless as I was with ideas, new characters, old ones paying a friendly nocturnal visit and certain problems of plot and pacing, I diverted myself by taking a photo of the front door.

Later, still awake, I stood at the dining room window looking out onto the street. I would never do this at home lest my neighbours think I’m odd, which is daft really because they probably already think that anyway. But in a strange house it seemed legitimate and so I stood staring out at nothing in particular for quite a long time. Then, turning to head for the kitchen and a cup of tea I caught a brief glimpse of my profile before my movement made it disappear. Intrigued, I decided take a second photo, this one of my shadow, as I was curious to see what is otherwise impossible for me to see.

So here it is, a self portrait of the insomniac writer thinking about (on this occasion) whether the photograph would be worth looking at. Maybe it is, maybe not.

But here’s a thought.

If I make a hard copy of it and put it among others in my loft, then maybe when I’m gone and my children go through my things to clear them out, they’ll see this picture and one of them will say, ‘That’s Daddy! I wonder what he was thinking about!?’ Then, after a pause for thought, one of them might add, ‘I wonder who took it?’

If there’s life after death, which I personally doubt, but if there is… my ghostly voice will answer, ‘An insomniac took it, you knew him well!’

LINKS: For those who like Al Pacino and thrillers the film Insomnia is worth watching, here’s the link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0278504/ which includes an excellent trailer. As this post implies, insomnia worries me not at all,  so I won’t offer a single one of the plus-500,000 pages Google lists under ‘Insomnia Cures’. But this Wikipedia entry offers some fascinating insights about insomnia as well as further links of its own: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insomnia

A few weeks ago I inadvertently broke the speed limit (37mph in a 30mph area) on the outskirts of Salisbury. Shortly afterwards the Wiltshire Police gave me the option of a statutory fine of £60.00 and three points on my licence or paying a £60.00 fee to attend a Speed Awareness Course with no points and no further questions asked.

            Yesterday I went on the course which took place in a non-descript building in Swindon, six other speeders attending, with two trainers taking us through what the rules are, the connections between speed and accidents, how to be a better (ie slower) driver and so on.

            One of many interesting points made during this really excellent three hours was that it is difficult,  perhaps impossible, to change people’s habitual driving styles which are often learnt from their parents. Another was how rarely people check out changes in the law after they have passed their test – a test incidentally which the instructors suggested was pretty low standard.

            The best that could be hoped for was that we, the speeders, would leave the session more aware of the needs of, and the risks to, others in the road, particularly pedestrians. It seems – which surprised me – that most accidents happen in 30 mph urban areas because that’s where the vulnerable pedestrians are – children, old people, shoppers.  It also seems that activities like drinking water, hands free phones, Satnav adjustments, changing a CD often involve drivers taking their eyes off the roads for two or three seconds. That’s six to ten car lengths. That’s time enough to cause  injury or death to someone.

            Listening to this I remembered an incident as a twelve year old when I stepped in front of a lorry on the way home from school. My French master pulled me back onto the pavement and saved my life. Thinking about it yesterday I realized for the first time that had I died then six children, two grandchildren, and the imagined worlds of eighteen novels would not exist; and you wouldn’t be reading this. You can debate  the same question for yourself supposing  you had died at twelve.

            ‘Ah, but that’s hypothetical,’ you might say. ‘You didn’t die…’

            True, but every day something like seven people do die on the roads and that’s not hypothetical. It’s every day. Meaning that every day, as I drive my car, I might be the one who wipes out the young lad who had he lived might have fathered six lovely children, grandfathered two adorable grandchildren and penned eighteen novels…

            Now that has made me think.

I’ve never been a fast driver, nor a reckless one.

            I’m courteous to other drivers, as to pedestrians.

            Aggression is not part of my driving style.

            I’m a nice chap.

            I wouldn’t harm a fly.

            But the hard fact is that ‘inadvertently’ as I put it at the top of this post I drove at 37mph in a 30mph zone. As the trainers pointed out, that’s 25% faster than I should have or, put another way, the equivalent of 85 mph on a motorway.

            Makes you think doesn’t it? It certainly makes me think.

Final tips from the trainers…

            Drive up to the speed limit, not at it.

            Plan journeys ahead, not once you start.

            Have water, tissues etc easily to hand but, if you can,  pull over every time you want to do anything in a car other than drive it.

            Finally, always leave early not late if an important appointment involves you driving a car.

            …and remember most of those drivers who kill those seven people a day are just like you and me: they wouldn’t hurt a fly, they’re nice chaps and chapesses and they think that 37mph in a 30mph isn’t much over the limit really, is it?

            I hate to admit it, but  it  is. Way over the limit.

            Did the course work? For me, it did. I’m more aware and that makes me a lot more culpable if I ever break the speed limit again. I can never again say I didn’t know…

LINKS: Two good links on this subject are www.dft.gov.uk/think – the government departmental website which is the internet portal for driving safety and awareness in all its variations; and the excellent Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents site www.rospa.com which has very good material on driving and its dangers. Be warned … if you google ‘speed awareness courses’ you get some  spoof sites which, in fact, are touting other sites which are the opposite of what they seem, seeking to show you how to avoid speed traps, fines and so on. Rather nasty. However Greater Manchester Police, which offers these courses locally,  has a good, simple site which explains the courses well: http://www.drivesafe.org.uk/index.php/home/speed-awareness  Some ferreting around may turn up something in your area.

IT’S AN AWE-INSPIRING business witnessing one of Britain’s premier orchestras recording a major new work by a living composer. But there I was last week in Cardiff, at the BBC’s HQ adjacent to the Millennium Centre, with a select audience of five people, watching the 75-member BBC National Orchestra of Wales record Adrian William’s magisterial and profoundly moving new Cello Concerto ahead of its first public performance at the Bangor New Music Festival later this week. The soloist is Raphael Wallfisch and conductor  is Grant Llwellyn.
Adrian was once described by Yehudi Menuhin as a “master of intricate patterns and forms”. His astonishing talent and quality was recognized early at the Royal College of Music. While studying there he received recognition for his first mature orchestral work, the gritty and ambitious Symphonic Studies, an achievement acknowledged by the RCM director Sir David Willcocks. More recently (2007) he wrote the music for BBC TV’s series about China’s Terracotta Army and a year later the hauntingly beautiful accompaniment to the BBC’s film Trouble in Amish Paradise.
Now his Cello Concerto (2009) marks the culmination of Adrian Williams’ long standing relationship with cello soloist Raphael Wallfisch, an ardent champion of his work. You can get a feel for the power and range of his work at http://www.adrianwilliamsmusic.com

Naturally, to an unmusical novelist like me, who can just about plod through Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star on a piano, and never did get to grips with notation, an invitation to a major recording was something special.
Don’t go in if the red light’s on I was warned. It wasn’t on when I arrived but even so I lingered outside the huge studio, peering through the little windows in the doors, wondering how to get in without being noticed. Orchestras in rehearsal don’t like gawping onlookers for a lot of very good reasons, one of them being that they  start coughing when they shouldn’t, and another, apparently the  ultimate sin: leaving  mobiles on…
Luckily for me there was a traffic jam in Cardiff so several members of the orchestra arrived a few minutes late, including a player of one of the six, repeat six, double basses used in the piece. I hid myself within the shadow of his vast instrument and made my way more or less unseen to the tiered seats to listen and watch.
In addition to the red light outside there were two within, on either side of the orchestra, so that no-one is in doubt when recording is happening. When that light goes on silence reigns and the magic of live performance happens.
Except that in a recording, it seems, you rarely get to hear the whole piece, just bits as each section is recorded to the satisfaction of the producer and composer before moving on to another bit. I saw neither during the playing, just heard their disembodied voices from some other place making comments and  adjustments so technical I couldn’t understand them; or so miraculously precise (like picking up in all the melee of sound that a clarinet was not playing an F-sharp when it should have been, naughty, naughty…) that I could only marvel at it all.
Perhaps most impressive was the sight of so many musicians going back and forth through a complex score and starting again, sight reading with total facility and equanimity. Apparently our orchestral musicians are very, very good at this because budgets are tight, time is short, so sight reading to a very high level is essential.
Rookie audience members like me have our own moments of drama, all self induced. The sudden going on of the red light induces an instant throat-tickle; and what briefly  troubles my soul as we reach the quietest passages of this exquisite music is the ghastly possibility that after all I did leave the mobile on and the builder working at that moment on the house is about to call about the important matter of the siting of the trench for the new waste pipe. I didn’t cough, he didn’t call and almost immediately the music took over again…

As well as the coming performance at Bangor on Friday (details at http://www.bnmf.co.uk/concerts.php ) Adrian Williams’ Cello Concerto is to be broadcast twice by the BBC over the next month or so and a CD is soon coming out.

I WATCHED WITHOUT pleasure the excuse of an apology given yesterday to the media by Cardinal Sean Brady, the Primate of All Ireland, for his role in suppressing the truth about abuse of children in their care by Catholic priests. This followed an apologetic sermon in Armagh Cathedral which was the occasion for admitting that he was party to making two children take a vow of silence that they had been abused, leaving the offending priest to continue such abuse for eighteen years.
This immoral use of a holy vow may not, in fact, have been necessary. I know from the experience of having a brother who was abused, though not by a priest, that deep and abiding shame is what may induce a lifetime of  silence. My brother only told me what actually happened – we had suspected it for years – in his mid-fifties, and then when he was drunk. When he died a few years later the verdict was suicide but I called it murder, by an abuser half a century before.
The first and only time I saw his face at peace was in death. Only then did he look on the outside like the beautiful, creative spirit I knew to be within and despite his cruelties to me I knew why I had been right to love him all his life.  It’s a story I tell in my unpublished novel The Man Who Feared Rain.
I am quite sure that reading the pathetic, weak and I think cowardly apology from  Brady – he deserves no holy honorific and is not getting one from me – many family members of abused children like my brother will feel as angry and upset. They know the lifetime of suffering abuse can cause. It often remains an unhealed wound.
His explanation for why he has not stepped down – and seems not yet to be planning to do so – is a familiar one to any who have heard the weasel words of some clergy, who ought perhaps to do one thing but find it advantageous to do another. He is,  he is quoted as saying, ‘discerning the will of the Holy Spirit’ in this matter before making a decision.
A form of morally limp  decision making which reminds me of something in a family diary we once had dating back to the mid-19th century. The gentleman, on my grandmother’s side, was an Anglican priest. Before we get to the key bit it’s worth me saying that the other bit I remember is that he had to pray for his wife when she was caught trying to pass off margarine as butter at the local fete. Hmmm! Not good! Soon after, and not connected with this small deceit, he was offered a better (and better paid) job. Instead of writing, ‘Great! More money! And I can get away from this horrible place and its vile little fetes! Yippee!’ he wrote screeds – and I mean screeds – on how troubled his conscience was about the possibility that he might have to leave his present flock for pastures new and richer. Much ink was spilt on this dubious angst but finally he declared he had decided to put his trust, like Brady, in guidance from the Holy Spirit, or its Anglican equivalent.
As his reader I waited with bated breath as the diary days went by to see which way the Holy Spirit would vote. Then, Surprise! Surprise! It decided that he must leave the flock he claimed he had no wish to leave and move on… which he did with heavy heart, no doubt.
With this sorry family tale in mind I hope I will be forgiven for being cynical about Brady’s dialogue with the Holy Spirit and saying that I believe that he will continue in office for a little while yet.

‘Wow!’ you say and want to stop the car and grab your camera and capture the uncatchable – an extraordinary sunset just across that field, past those leafless trees, out over the far beyond of the chalk downland you’re driving across, so striking it seems despite all that to be almost within reach.
So you speed up a bit, look for a lay-by, and fail to find one. You look for a turn to the left, there’s not one of those either and the sunset’s shifting, changing, maybe waning before your eyes.
You slow, you take another peek and it all disappears behind some trees casting them into bright silhouette as a young van driver comes up behind you, threatening.
You speed up again and miss the only lay-by because you can’t stop with the van so close and the sky’s turned from blue to weird green and the clouds are haloed in gold and the sun’s rays shoot up out of them like the last moments of an opera when someone was dying but not wanting to leave.
A fingerpost far ahead, indicating a left.
You speed even more, scudding westward around a bend, the van left behind, the sun suddenly threatening your eyes as the sun visor is pulled down with one hand to save your vision and you turn the wheel hard to the left with the other, making the left and looking for a place to stop.
The van roars by behind, a youthful passenger’s jeering fist in the air. The road dips straight ahead Roman-like and then up the rolling landscape. It veers left again and the sunset moves off to the right, the clouds moving too, doing strange things with the rays which spread out, bifurcate, disappear, reappear and settle down to something less than they were a moment before.
A gate to a field, a place to stop, a car coming towards you in the distance, its sidelights already on.
But the sunset’s still amazing.
You grab your rucksack, , the zip sticks, you pull it anyway, it opens with a protesting rasp, and you take out the camera inside, fingers playing automatically with the settings as you climb out into the cold air, round the back of the car and into a great field of grey chalky soil.
You raise the camera and take a shot. Something’s captured at least.
The light’s going, the clouds shifting, the sky utterly magnificent and you’re smaller than an ant out on that wonderful fold of chalk, you’re there, here, now. No better place to be.
Another picture taken against the light and then a third and you look around and remember that a few miles from where you stand is Watership Down, the most famous fictional Down of all.
The clouds shift, the moment seems finally gone but you jump into the car to see if there’s still a different shot at the dying sun.
You stop again and climb out, more slowly now.
The clouds have gone and the sun’s just itself now, no haloes, no rays: its magnificent dying self beyond a hawthorn hedge and you take a few more shots as off to the right, where it’s already shadowed, and down by the hedge, where it’s almost black, rabbits appear: Fiver and his brother Hazel, Bigwig and General Woundwort.
The sun sets swiftly and you stand alone wondering what happened to Richard Adams who offered you lift once in his chauffeur-driven car from a literary gig in Birmingham and talked anthropomorphic story-telling all the way home like no-one before or since; and who paid you the compliment of having read your book as you read his.
The sun is almost gone and the camera’s no use any more.
You watch evening come. Just you and a chalky field whose subtle harrow lines disappear towards the last light in the sky; and a story that set your imagination alight so many years before, as great stories do; the cool breeze in your hair and the scampering of rabbits you can hear but no longer see.

Richard Adams is now 89 and lives not far from the downland his first novel immortalized. It had many rejections from publishers before it finally found a publishing home with Rex Collings and huge success: a story to warm the heart of every would-be writer. My last meeting with him was at a busy Society of Authors function when I went over to say hello. Fortunately I knew he could be, shall we say, irascible. He peered at me suspiciously and asked what I wrote and I said ‘Duncton Wood’. He replied very tartly, ‘No you didn’t. A fellow called Horwood wrote that.’ I decided it was best not to argue the point. Then, as now, I go to the shelves and hold Watership Down in my hands with pleasure and affection and hope that if the sun is setting finally on its author’s life it is doing so as beautifully, and gloriously as the sunset I chased yesterday across the Downs.

You have to look hard for colour in the landscape at the moment, even on sunny days. But on drab, drear ones, when the chill factor drags the heartiest walker down, the search becomes nearly pointless. In the snow, which we still have, even more so.

But soon Lesser Celandine will be a bright exception. Last year, when my photograph was taken,  a  combination of cold, rain and light made the small carpets they form in the woodlands exceptionally thick and yellow. However  the cheerful sight of them is always laced with professional guilt. I confused them with winter aconite, the other early flower, in one of my first novels. The result has been three decades of uncertainty of this particular flower, like a grown man who still hesitates over long division because his maths teacher once bellowed in his ear, ‘You don’t do it that way, Horwood!’

Today,  after a cold and colourless walk and a restorative hot bath, I continue to strip the wallpaper in a room in my writing house. There’s not much colour there either since the nearly eighty-year-old walls (the house was built in 1932) have an accretion of papers and paints all of which but the first have been unprofessionally applied. The last is, or was, magnolia, that favourite of all colours among the Undecideds. Yet colour suddenly appears when I remove the cladding around the window put up in the Seventies when secondary glazing became  the craze.

It reveals the original wallpaper, floral and to some eyes, horrible. But to a novelist, or this one, everything is a source of interest if not beauty. Someone chose this paper and as it happens I know who it was: the original owner of my house was Oxford’s premier car dealer and he built the house as his first family home, not knowing that one day it would be marginalized on a ring road by the very product on which they built their fortune. When cars began to roar by in ever-increasing numbers they moved somewhere better but kept the house for sentimental reasons until their children, by then growing old, sold it to me.

One reason it appealed was that the original owner’s surname began with H like mine and he had two ghastly tiled fireplaces built in the shape of that letter in the main bedrooms. I’ve removed them now, no easy task, but I like physical labour between writing words. Now I’ve reached the wallpaper.

I’ll leave the last good bit to the end but meanwhile continue the slow and curiously relaxing business of stripping the rest of the walls with my steamer. This brings off the layers only slowly, meaning that shadows of the old wallpaper appear like Christ’s face on the Turin Shroud. But my palette knife brutally slides through these vestiges of what went before and then the old is gone forever. Not-so-random thoughts come to me as I continue the job: redecorating a room like this, I tell myself, is not unlike writing a novel. You have to strip away a lot before getting to the essence and then you start building up again. For the novelist, like the decorator, the greatest reward often lies in the process itself.

This morning the snow began to melt and the sun to shine. I went  out into my garden to see if, at least, colour’s finally appearing there. Just a winter crocus or two, already wan and fallen, their lifetime over; and sunshine in the netting of the chicken-run (the chickens long gone) in the old orchard. But at least the air’s not freezing any more and amazingly I find the daffodils, like a pack of dogs awaiting freedom, bursting to get out of the carapaces that now seemed barely to hold them. When they come colour will finally  return to my garden and also across the landscape, and soon, where the celandine briefly were, bluebells will start to show.

Imtiaz Dharker’s disembodied voice floated into my consciousness  during a moment of insomnia  when I was listening to the World Service.  It kept me awake for an hour. Dharker is  a poet who recites her poetry from memory, like ordinary living speech and not in the dirge-like style of so many poets the moment they get near a public platform. Until then I had never heard of her but after only a few poems some of her qualities became plain: humour, compassion and a rich sense of the many faces of love.

So now I’m reading her latest collection Leaving Fingerprints (Bloodaxe Books, 2009) and find my late-night impressions were right. Her theme here  combines  impermanence and the preciousness of the moment with a strong sense of the presence in that moment of ancestral shadows. As a  restless wanderer through the external landscapes of town and country and the internal territories of the mind, body and emotions,  it’s a theme that appeals to me.

The room with two doors

Pass the wine, we’ll leave here soon enough.
We were visitors, we always knew,
even though the host welcomed us,
ushered us in, lit candles for us,
plied us with carafes of wine.

It would be a mistake, however,
to imagine we are free to stay
in this room with two doors,
drinking and eating, telling jokes,
exchanging stories for ever.

The wind swept us in through one door
and is pushing at the other.
Outside, it is waiting for us, running
impatient fingers through the trees,

waiting to take our hearts, browse through them
and toss them to the earth like finished leaves.

The blurb with Leaving Fingerprints has a first sentence which opens up so many lines of enquiry that it might be the start of prize-winning literary novel: Imtiaz Dharker was born in Lahore, Pakistan, grew up a Muslim Calvinist in a Lahori household in Glasgow and eloped with a Hindu Indian to live in Bombay…. setting up perfectly the following wonderful poem of memory, reconciliation, forgiveness and familial love:

Green spiked hair

So I ran away from home with a man
from another country and a small suitcase
that contained a pair of pink suede shoes,
a passport, the condensed sayings of
Chairman Mao wrapped in red underwear
and a copy of Les Fleurs du Mal by Baudelaire.

At Heathrow tens years after I had left
I met my father coming off a flight.
Hello? I said. He said Hello, polite as ever,
and walked on. I followed. Excuse me?
I’m your daughter? Ah, he said, not breaking step.
So are you well? And your family?
I’m afraid I need to go now
to catch a connecting flight.

A few years later at another airport
I catch up with him at last.
He had no memory of the incident
when an unknown woman with green spiked
hair accosted him in the transit lounge
claiming to be his little girl

the one he lost
the one who left with a suitcase and
his only copy of the poems of Faiz.

But in the arrival hall the lines come back to him,
Give some tree the gift of green again,
he says, smiling at the words or me,
Let one bird sing.

The green spikes in the hair of his daughter, Imtiaz, may be long gone, but she sings, how she sings.

There’s more about her work and how to obtain it at http://www.bloodaxebooks.com/titlepage.asp?isbn=1852248491 Make sure to watch the short video that runs at the foot of  this link. It’s a brief understated masterclass in how to present poetry.

RIGHT NOW the Winter Olympics are being shown wall to wall on the BBC… and  being an Olympic junkie I find myself watching events I have never shown any interest in before,  for which I do not know the rules and which I will never  participate in  for the good reason that I am not  actually insane.

The ice racing looks absolutely lethal but consider the major down hill skiing events. They are on courses so slippery and steep that even if you fall over en route you still cover four kilometres in under two minutes. Failing those, there’s the gruelling event involving travelling great distances on skis uphill and down dale with a gun on your back and shooting at barely visible targets along the way.

YOU CAN TRY snow-boarding at several million miles an hour with other people up close and personal and heading for the same narrow gates so they can beat each other to the finish line in the valley far below. Too risky?  Then try curling, which is bowls on ice using 20kg blocks of granite and brushes to keep them moving.  Whatever, it’s colourful, full of bite-size moments, highly charged and emotional and absolutely riveting… in short, the perfect displacement activity for writers of fantasy like me who spend time in virtual worlds we’ll never  reach doing heroic things via our characters which require great skill and leadership while zapping the evil opposition.

Even if you’re not into these kinds of sport it’s worth turning on one of the broadcasts this year for the credit sequence.  It’s stunning, slightly sinister and incredibly clever visually, showing an anonymous comic-book hero getting from A to B using all the different sports on the way and destroying The Evil One  before winning the gold. I guess it’s more or less monochrome because these days, as my images show, Olympians dress like super heroes to such an extent that they are barely identifiable as real people.  So  the credit sequence can only differentiate itself from the ‘real’ thing by going black and white.

It took me a while to find the link where you can see the whole sequence without the overlay of BBC stuff so to save you the trouble here it is: http://campaignlive.co.uk/theWork/news/979791/gallery/6665/page/2/#6665 Enjoy! Pure fantasy!

IT IS A VERY ODD feeling signing a pile of one’s own books, not least because it is sometimes hard to believe you wrote it in the first place. Your name’s on it, your photograph is on an inside flap, there’s a bio somewhere which reduces your life to a few short lines, but did you write it? The short answer is: no you didn’t, someone else did. That previous you, or one of them, the one that got left behind the day you delivered the final corrections to the manuscript and kissed goodbye to months and years of thought, effort, occasional grief, moments of (as you briefly thought at the time) genius, longer moments of (as you also thought at the time) believing it’s all rubbish, total knackerdom, indescribable frustration and all the many other angsts that go with a long term creative project.

So when you find yourself months, sometimes years later, with the finished book in your hand, or a whole pile of them, it’s no surprise that you feel a little disengaged from the book into which you’re putting your signature. It feels like the marriage is over and you’ve yet to find a way to be just good friends.

I have never spoken to another author about how they feel about their books, which is also odd since I’ve had just about every other conversation possible with my fellow authors: the problems of research, writing blocks, the best routine, displacement activities, guilt for important things left undone and people ignored, and so on. But their relationship to their own printed books? No, not that conversation.

My relationship with my own was brought into focus this week when I signed a whole lot of copies of Hyddenworld: Spring at Goldsboro Books in Cecil Court off the Charing Cross Road, a shop and a location that all lovers of books should visit from time to time. The shop is very well known among lovers and collectors of signed first editions because it’s co-owner (with Daniel) and managing director, David Headley, is a very good bookseller. Bookselling is a competitive field with narrow margins (as the recent collapse of Borders demonstrates) under electronic threat, so anyone who succeeds at it is doing something very right. What that is, apart from having the right systems in place, starts, continues and ends with one thing: a genuine love of books and story they are able to communicate to others.

The signing takes place in the shop’s tiny basement. We talk, we have a laugh, my pen runs out, he can’t really decide what his favourite book is and nor can I and so many authors’ names trip off his tongue with affection that I begin to realize that he’s met more authors than I’ve eaten chips. He takes a photo of me, and a short video too and we go back upstairs into the light of day. I ask for a card with the address of the shop on and it turns out it’s illustrated with part of a painting that’s hanging right there behind the counter. It turns out that the painting, by Nicola Budd, is of the shop’s 10th Birthday Party, as it spilled out onto the pavement of Cecil Court. David tells that it has everybody else’s image in it but his own.

So here he is, a genuine bookseller, the real thing, a performer of that final magic that needs to take place in the whole shebang of writing books: bringing writer and buyer together… and he’s not in the picture! I take one of him with it and he smiles and another tiny bit of magic takes place. Quite inexplicable really. He’s so warm and full of affection for books that he makes me suddenly feel that maybe I did write my book after all – and that I’m very glad indeed he’s the guy who’s selling it. You’ll find  details of David and Daniel’s shop at http://www.goldsborobooks.com

I ONCE FOUND myself teaching the last day of a creative writing class on St. Valentine’s Day and suggested we have a wind-down group discussion about particular issues and problems not raised during the week. One of the students asked the tongue-in-cheek question: ‘What is literary genius and how can I achieve it?’

The best moments in teaching often come unrehearsed and this proved one of them for me because part of the poem in Act II of Twelfth Night, one of the few I know by heart, came to mind. Ever since I studied the play at ‘A’ level I’ve regarded those few lines as real genius. Since I’m a proponent of experiential learning I replied, ‘One way to find the answer is to try to express the following sentiments better than he did…’ I then wrote the poem on the white board:

What is love? ’tis not hereafter;
Present mirth hath present laughter;
What’s to come is still unsure:
In delay there lies no plenty;
Then come kiss me, sweet and twenty,
Youth’s a stuff will not endure.

The class read it, digested it, smiled a little at the sentiment and then, I thought, picked up their pens with slightly too much confidence. ‘Fifteen minutes enough?’ I said. There were many furrowed brows and eventually a kind of collective sigh of good-natured defeat as one by one they gave up.

The ensuing discussion was fascinating, not least because it came from a place of very rapidly re-discovered respect for the Bard. The key points that emerged about what a piece of literary genius might be were that it a) expresses universal truth(s) b) is economical with words c) uses language that is in some way memorable, and probably beautiful,  and d) has an intrinsic sense of compassion for humankind.

Which is a tall order in fifteen minutes. But I have an uncomfortable  feeling that that, or something like it, might have been all the time it took for Shakespeare to write the verse. The film from which my image comes is simply wonderful and the perfect displacement activity for anyone who wants to be a literary genius and is planning to start being one… tomorrow.