On the Sofa

There are days to savour in the full knowledge that on the day after you will be back at home emptying the rubbish, or taking hair out of a plug hole. Yesterday was one of them. After weeks of rain I took a train on a bright sunny day up to London,where,at Paddington station,my eye was gladdened by the sight of a stand of 'Jasmine Nights.' prominently displayed in W.H.Smith. Yes, I've been Richard and Judied again,and couldn't be more thrilled. Nervous at the thought of joining them on the sofa at 2.30 p.m. I had my hair done at a posh hairdressers near Orion,and this elegant young man with three crucially arranged tattoos on his neck did my makeup. When I asked him where he'd trained he said he was a dry cleaner,which worried me a bit until he said,'no darling, DRAG Queen.' Great, I thought,I'm going to come out looking like Danny La Rue, all jewelled eyelashes and lipgloss,but he was tres subtle and sitting on the sofa with R and J, turned out to be nothing like as terrifying as I thought it would be. We had an interesting warm up chat regarding writing horror stories which Richard won hands down by admitting he had recently deleted three whole chapters of his new novel, and had wanted to shoot himself. This reminded me of the time, my dear father, showed me a carefully honed short story he'd recently written, and then absentmindedly mistaking it for his cigarette thrown it into the fire. It was interesting to meet some of the other R and J authors- Rachel Joyce, Chris Cleave, John Green- when asked for our nuggets of wisdom about getting stories written they were remarkably similar and down to earth: read a lot; write a lot,don't give up.