Topping and Tailing

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I admit to you that I’m finding getting older difficult. Well, really it’s easy because you just sort of hang about and it happens. But regardless of that, I am now and always will be grateful that I did the work that I’ve done at the precise time I did it.

This is not remotely going to be something about how the past was better. I don’t really care about the past and I actually resent the time I’m spending if I’m thinking of something I’ve done before when I could be doing something new.

Instead, this is about how things are different for the physical work in media. Things are better now, in fact, and pretty much infinitely so. For instance, just in the last hour before you and I started talking, I topped and tailed eight videos on my iPad. If you don’t happen to know the term, topping and tailing is putting something at the start and the end, and often removing something from there. All I’ve just now done is put the title sequences around some prepared footage. Very quick, very simple, and I’m doing it on an iPad, a thin sheet of glass, sitting on my couch.

I adore this stuff. Right now someone else is editing this week’s AppleInsider Podcast instead of me and I’m a bit jealous: being deep into an audio, nudging sentences around, prepping different versions, it’s mechanical but creative work and if I am good at it, I know that it is explicitly because I was taught on physical media.

The short version of that is to do with making decisions and making mistakes. When you’ve got five strips of tape around your neck and are using a razor blade to slice through a sixth while biting on a chinagraph pencil because you’ve nowhere else to put it, you have to keep track of this, you have to make the cut in the right place. And always you were doing it on deadline so it had to be right and it had to be now.

So being able to swipe my finger across an audio track on an iPad or to just undo every cut I’ve made in the whole session, it is ridiculously simple. But I also do fewer swipes, I undo much less than I might, because I’m used to being quick and decisive.

Only in this, I wouldn’t claim to be either in any other way.

But, look. Physical tape. An iPad. Nostalgia. Aging. These have all come to a point for me this week because of something that also is a point: I am the deputy chair of the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain and I will stand on tables shouting when writers are denied their dues, in every sense of that. (Apple is currently pissing me off, for instance, because they’re running a campaign celebrating creatives and they never, repeat never, name the poor sods who write this stuff for them. I have pressed.)

So all of this is going on in my head and yet here I am watching “Thin Air” on YouTube. It should not be there. It is a 1980s BBC drama serial and the writers are not being paid for this, no one on the show is. In every way, it is wrong and bad that it is available and so much so that I could well have to switch to past tense, it’s that likely to be removed.

But Thin Air has never been released commercially. It cannot be streamed. I don’t believe it has ever been repeated since its first airing in 1988. I do have a copy of it, but it’s on VHS and it must be twenty years since I’ve been able to play VHS.

Yet watching it now, I am just agog at it. Written by Sarah Dunant and Peter Busby, it’s set in a commercial radio station in London. It’s a thriller, I am once again into it, but I’m also riveted by how it’s a commercial radio station in the 1980s. All my work was in BBC local radio but here’s the lead character, Rachel (Kate Hardie) with five strips of tape around her neck. Here’s a standing reel to reel tape machine. Here’s the chinagraph pencil for making edit marks, here’s the blade for cutting it.

And here’s this lead character, holding a strip of tape and running it across that machine’s playhead to check what it is.

It is prehistoric. And quite wonderful.

I once told Sarah Dunant that I wanted to be Rachel Hamilton from this show. I watch this now and I wouldn’t want to be in the 1980s, I wouldn’t want to go back, and yet I do also want to be Rachel in that station at that time.

That character is at the beginning of her career and I’m trying not to think about mine because I simply haven’t started yet. But I look at this show, I look at the fact I am watching it on an iPad, this glass that would have been unimaginable in the 1980s and is barely imaginable now. It’s hard not to think about then and now, it’s very hard not think about how my career will be topped and tailed.

But I tell you, for the present, I am done with the past. There’s no future in it.

Funny characters: Ho, Ho, Ho

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The first time I heard of Slow Horses was a year or so before it began airing, when a TV company wanted to talk with me because a script of mine was like it. Quite possibly they just meant the subject matter was, but I took it at the time to be a compliment and of course having now seen the show, I’m taking it as an even greater one.

But there is one thing about the writing of this show. It is a dramatisation of Mick Herron’s novels and with a vague sense of due diligence, after I met with that company, I read the first one. I don’t think I can claim that it was then with an abundance of due diligence that I went on to read every novel in this Slough House series back to back, but that’s what I did.

And there is this one thing about the TV version. The novels are very visual, I could see how I’d have had a go at dramatising them, except for this one thing that, no question, would be beyond me and is beyond me.

Roddy Ho.

If you know the show or the novels, you relish this character, and if you don’t, I envy you having him to look forward to. He is a staggeringly annoying computer guy, more arrogant than the sun and I don’t know why I just said it that way, except he also as absolutely wrong in his view of the world as The Sun.

But here’s the thing. The utter joy of Ho in the novels is that every now and again, Mick Herron writes a chapter from Ho’s point of view. I suppose it’s the same joke every time, but it’s a scream. How he sees the world and how through this lens, we see what is really happening. (In the latest Slough House novel, Clown Town, Ho overhears a barista talking about him to a colleague. He swaggers because of the impact he’s clearly had on her, just the latest example that morning of his raw sexuality. But what she’s muttered is “big cock”.)

Roddy Ho is a tremendous creation and I could not fathom how a TV show was going to convey him when there couldn’t be this view from inside, this internal and borderline deranged first-person monologue.

This would now be a good point to say that, five series in, the show does it marvellously. The show does it marvellously. But this would also be a good point for me to say how it’s done this and, swear to god, I still don’t know. There isn’t a beat I remember from the novels that isn’t played in the series, but if you asked me to write a scene, this would block me.

It’s a failure of imagination on my part, I know. But I’d rather just say that Mick Herron writes Ho superbly, and so now do the TV show’s writers, Morwenna Banks, Mark Denton, Jonny Stockwood, Sean Gray, Edward Docx and lead writer Will Smith.

Tragedy plus time equals success

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I loathe looking back at whatever tiny things I’ve done in my life: I want to be doing new tiny things. But this week I was — I want to say forced but that’s too much. I was enabled. Encouraged. Actually, I was just asked.

And the thing is, recounting a certain thing in a new context has somehow changed my memory of it. Not really, not completely, but some of the wiring in my head has been nudged into a better place.

Follow. This is the true version: I wrote on the 2001 television revival of Crossroads and it was a profoundly bad experience. I was fired from it.

Okay, I didn’t do it well enough, I didn’t write well enough. And actually I was so damaged by this apparent proof that I was a failure as a writer that for five years afterwards, I was doing all the usual things of pursuing writing work, even getting a lot of it in some fields, but it was like I was pretending. I knew I couldn’t write: it had been proven.

I remember that this period was five years because then I somehow earned a place on a writing masterclass kind of thing. We had workshops on radio, theatre, something else I’ve forgotten, and television. I only went to the TV one because otherwise I’d be wasting a space someone else, an actual writer, could have used. And it was like that anvil was lifted because it was there that I learned everyone got fired from that show. And it was there that I learned I had done close to everything the way I should have done. Not the writing, clearly, but how I took it, what I did, I was pretty close to good.

Truly, I felt lighter leaving that room. But if it helped me simply gigantically, that day didn’t change that I had been fired, it didn’t change how bad an experience it had all been.

Fast forward to this week when Crossroads star Tony Adams died. I was asked to talk about Crossroads on BBC CWR who somehow remembered that I’d written for the show. BBC Radio WM didn’t know that and were audibly delighted when I explained why, yes, I did know something about it.

Naturally, the point of talking on these two stations was Tony Adams, it was hardly going to be me, and of course neither show I was on had time to be a therapy session.

So I’m on there, talking enthusiastically about the series and — true — how impressed I was when I was given the original brief about what was going to be done with Adams’s character. I had a good time on the radio, I think I did it well, I enjoyed myself hugely.

I enjoyed talking about Crossroads.

For twenty years it’s been a pain point. For about six minutes this week, it was fun.

And I swear to you those few minutes have changed me. I can now look back — well, not happily, but I can look back.

Romancing the stony-faced

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Last Saturday, I was running a Spark Young Writers’ workshop for Writing West Midlands and blathering on about genre, as you might. The trick of it was ultimately that I was going to get these teenagers to write half a story in a particular genre, pretending that we were taking it halfway just because we — truthfully — don’t get much time together.

And then of course I had them finish the story — in a different genre.

But to get this all set up nicely, I needed to have them vote on which genres they liked. Whenever possible, make it so that something is their fault rather than yours. Plausible deniability, it’s a skill.

For no very good reason whatsoever, though, I counted the votes in front of them and declared that there had been seven for horror and — quite remarkably given that there were eight people in the room — exactly 403 for romance.

Their faces. Their groans.

I didn’t put them through writing romance, but we did briefly talk about it. And as I did with them, I will maintain with you that romance is the hardest genre to write.

But this is again and again on my mind, and especially so this week, regardless of that workshop. For one thing, I’ve just ludicrously over-spent on a particular new iPad whose screen is so fantastic that it’s making me re-watch all of my favourite films because they look incredible. And first on the list were ones like Man Up, Kissing Jessica Stein and The Bourne Identity. Okay, the last is a thriller but I will stand on a high hill and say forever that thrillers and romances are the same thing. Or they can be, anyway.

But then there’s also this. On Wednesday, I read a review of the new, second season of the romantic comedy “Nobody Wants This.” on Netflix. (The full stop is important.) Without spoiling the show or, I suppose, spoiling the whole review, it rather criticised the second season for being like the first. This was meant as a criticism. My fully worked out, carefully considered response as someone who has been a professional TV critic — professional as in paid to do it, I’m not claiming anything more than that — and as someone who has both seen the first season and read the couple of scripts available online, was oh, for fuck’s sake.

If the reviewer is really just telling me that they didn’t like the first season, then I’m surprised at them but each to their own — and I don’t know why I should read their review of the second. If they said it has improved, that can really only mean that it has changed to suit their tastes. If they say it’s worse, I don’t know whether to think that means I’ll find it even better than the first.

Since I believe that the function of a critic — at least when I do it — is to alert you to shows you may like yet miss in the flood of them all, I’m not interested in someone’s opinion of what a show should or should not do in order to improve. You see a lot of this with online criticism, unprofessional criticism in every sense, where someone will declare how a series should not do X and absolutely must do Y. And it’s usually that the reviewer has been thinking about this for the 30-minute running time of an episode, where the writer, producer and all others involved in the show have been spending 70 hours a week for a year on it and may just possibly have thought of that same brilliant thing — and then of why it couldn’t be done.

Ah, let me be a TV critic again. Just for a moment. “Nobody Wants This.” by Erin Foster on Netflix has a superb first season. When I got to my desk at 5am yesterday, I checked whether the second season had dropped. I was that keen. (It hadn’t. Looks like Netflix launches shows at 08:00 BST or then 09:00 GMT depending. I did not know this.)

By the time the episodes were available, I was deep into the day’s work and couldn’t watch. I’ve now seen just the first of the new ten episodes. And I am immediately back in that world, with these characters, and completely, instantly invested in them all.

Obviously I don’t know if I’ll like the remaining nine. But I’ll tell you, I was a little worried going in. For the first season is a pretty complete romance story, if there hadn’t been anymore I’d have actually been upset but it would still have worked as it was. That means coming in to a second season, Foster and her writing team have to pick up the story anew and launch us into something that will last over ten episodes.

I think she’s done it. I know for certain that it is INCREDIBLY HARD not to WATCH THE ENTIRE THING RIGHT NOW.

Inciting references

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There’s a very good gag in Mick Herron’s new “Slough House” novel, an actual laugh-aloud moment — but only if you’ve watched The Great British Bake Off and, more specifically, the sponsor adverts that used to surround it. If you haven’t, I think it comes across as a moment of silliness.

You can’t unknow what you know, so I’ll never be sure, but I think that silliness works. You have no doubt, given the context, that it is a joke, but it’s also delivered in a moment that is otherwise acutely serious.

That’s always so difficult. A tense moment can be the perfect point for a joke and I do believe that you need serious and humorous, that you need light and shade. But so often a tense moment can be punctured because of a funny line. Or more often, a line that is intended to be funny but fails. You know the kind of thing: the hero is faced with a firing squad and says with a raised eyebrow, “Ten soldiers? I thought there was a manpower crisis.”

Jokes like that are not there to be funny, they are there to impress us with the hero’s bravery and I think it’s fair to say that without one single exception, they do not work. They cheapen the drama, they lower the stakes.

So here’s Herron and if you get the joke, he is running a gag dead centre of a serious point. And if you don’t get it, you see there’s some silliness — dead centre of a serious point.

That, I think, is some marvellous writing. Let me point you at it: “Clown Town” by Mick Herron, the latest in the series better known as “Slow Horses”.

Only, I’m surprised I like it so much since, as I say, more often the joke is this cheapening type. As it happens, this one is a reference, and I’ve wondered whether reference jokes are dangerous. I’ve thought before that referring to something outside of the fiction breaks the story. It tells us that the story is just a story, that it is one tale amongst many others.

In the same book, Herron makes it clear that a character is listening to the theme song from the “Slow Horses” TV show and that one feels contrived. It isn’t the type of music you’d imagine that character listening to, for one thing, and overall it seems like the writer nudging you in the ribs.

It does take you out of the story and to me that’s unforgivable. It’s so hard to get someone into your story, but it’s harder still to get them back in after you’ve chosen to thrown them out.

Yet here’s this reference to a TV show that I didn’t think worked, and there’s that reference to the adverts around the Bake Off, which I think does.

Let me go check my Rules of Writing book, I’ll get back to you.

Time zoned out

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There’s a small but remarkably significant moment in one of my favourite novels, “Misterioso” by Alan Plater. One day, Rachel travels from Hull to London, and when she gets to her hotel that afternoon, she has a nap.

That’s it.

But she wakes up in the evening and I think you eventually realise that this is the moment her life changes. For what she’s actually done is flip day for night: she spends that night at a jazz club, being driven back to her hotel only the next morning. In Alan’s television dramatisation of his novel, there’s this exchange I’ve always liked a lot:

RACHEL: That pink stuff in the sky. Is that dawn?
PAUL: Yes. You’ve never seen one before?
RACHEL: Not in living memory.
PAUL: I’ll drive a bit closer to it.

For the rest of the week she spends in London, Rachel is now a night person. Instantly changed from a daytime travel agent worker into a nighttime jazz club attendee and then waitress. It’s also who she is meant to be. You come to think that this is the real Rachel.

Last Saturday, I went to Paris and having done my usual thing of working every second possible up to then, I was knackered. Mid-afternoon, I get to my hotel, kick off my shoes, and I sleep deeply and soundly, interrupted only by thoughts of this novel.

It’s not like I woke up having become a Parisian. (I first wrote “It’s not like I woke up a Parisan”, but that sounds like there was someone else there from Paris.) But I did wake up with a series of things to do and no requirement to do any of them, no requirement to do anything at any time. This was meant to be a working trip, it was a self-assembly writing retreat, in which I intended to get a particular project written and also obviously see some more of Paris.

I did all of that. Wrote a lot, finished the project, had dinner at Le Pure Café from “Before Sunset”, which is one of my top-one films. Had a great time and felt changed by it.

Only, there is something else in “Misterioso”. It took me a long time to register just how fast that day/night flip goes for Rachel, but ever since I first read the book back in the 1980s, there’s been an element that has stuck with me. And stuck with me quite worriedly.

Rachel goes back to Hull. She goes back to her life there and it’s like the life is the wrong size now. What particularly sticks with me is how she is treated by her boyfriend Will and while he’s welcoming her home, he’s cooked her favourite meal, he’s interested in what she has to tell him, it’s all also just wrong. It rankles and we know it immediately. From the novel:

Will was at the barrier to meet her. He took her case, and the flowers, then contrived a kiss and a hampered hug. “I’ve missed you,” he said. According to all the scripts, she should have said: “I missed you, too” but what she said was: “Thank you.”

The problem is that he thinks he knows her and Rachel has come to realise that she didn’t know herself. So much has changed for her, and here he is, “certain that he knew her”. For all that he is a sweet guy and a very dear friend, she is no longer who he is so certain she is and what he thinks is a great welcome home is totally wrong because to her this doesn’t even seem like home anymore.

The short version for me is that his certainty makes the situation, and him, boring.

While I was away in Paris, my wife Angela was away with her sister. As I write this, she’s coming back later today and I so badly don’t want coming home to be boring for her.

Getting butter down pat

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I appear to have reached that age where I object to companies cutting the size of products. It was only a day ago that I would shrug at how Mars Bars are a fraction of the size they once were, but now I’m Mr Grump.

Because butter has been hit by it. I can no longer stand idly by and, you know, get over it while I get on with my life, now that a pat of butter is the same width and height as it was, but getting on for a third less depth. The height and width fool you on supermarket shelves, but once you’ve picked it up, you know. You know it’s less. You know the company was trying to trick you.

And you know damn well that the price has not been cut to match.

Funny story. In 1990, the Hershey chocolate bar was introduced in America and priced at a nickel, five cents, or about 4p in the UK — and it stayed at a nickel until November 1969. They kept the price but, as I learned recently from the Acquired podcast, they coped with inflation and rising costs by shrinking the bar. By November 1969, that Hershey bar was just about exactly half the weight it originally was.

Now, the company caved and doubled the price to 10 cents. That’s not enough to cover the cost of the bar, and especially not since to mollify buyers, the accompanied the price rise with a return to the original size of the bar. So now people are not thinking, well, it’s more expensive but they held on for 70 years, they’re thinking they’ve been progressively more duped for seven decades.

Whereas I’m thinking, this means we have always had this kind of shrinking and I should just live with it. I am mollified by the Hershey story because I love the detail behind things you don’t usually think of. I am mollified by the fact that I’ve noticed the shrinking so the global corporate conspiracy has failed to fool me.

But then I’m also mollified over shrinkage because if I ever had a Hershey bar craving, I dare say I could stretch to buying two of them.

What I can’t do, I learned this week, was buy a deep pan pizza from Pizza Hut ever again. The sole reason I liked those pizzas was this deep pan style and I thought the chain had made a mistake, but they haven’t. Deep pan is gone.

And I realise now that it was in an excellent episode of “Press Gang” — “The Week and Pizza” by Steven Moffat — that I first saw such a thing as a deep pan Pizza Hut pizza. I presume that was excessive product placement, but it was also effective because for thirty years now I’ve been buying it.

So I’m perusable by advertising, but not fooled by shrinkage, and I can’t get a decent pizza any more. I just do not know how I’m going to keep my overweight up.

Invisible Man

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So I’ve been walking through Solihull’s Mell Square and abruptly notice that I’m on a street where my mom once worked in a pub. I’m trying to work out where the pub was, since everything’s changed and what I think is the right place is now a tea and cake shop.

There’s also a McDonald’s where I once sat with an extremely nervous stomach because I was an hour early for my first day writing for McDonnell Douglas. That hasn’t changed, but it doesn’t have the stopping power that the memory of my mother does.

But still, the whole street was familiar enough that I really did come to an actual stop. I like to think that I’m aware enough of my surroundings that I never just halt, I never make people behind me have to dodge around to the side. This time I did, this time the realisation of where I was halted me.

Only, I also then realised that nobody noticed. It’s not like I think anyone should, but you know if you stand still in a shopping area you’re going to get approached by sales people or fundraisers. And there were plenty of them around, they just entirely ignored me.

When you’re even ignored by religious groups with megaphones in their hand and no possible chance of luck in their day, something has happened. You’ve crossed a line somewhere.

You’ve become a woman over 30.

Speaking of women, a teenage one just tried to walk straight through me. Now it was my turn to dodge but she didn’t notice and somehow that seemed even stranger. I truly do not expect to be noticed but I’m a man, she’s a woman and while this should not be true, it is: women have to have built-in threat assessment skills. Hopefully she does, and of course it’s good that she recognised I’m not a problem, but out of the 1 to 5 DEFCON ratings available, she put me somewhere around the same level as a glass door.

I can’t be unhappy about that, but I am. I can’t be unhappy that sales assistants ignore me when I walk into stores now. I don’t know whether I am.

Although maybe I exude something, maybe the religious groups can detect an atheist at a hundred paces. And maybe Apple Store staff eyeballed me instantaneously because they could smell a potential sale.

But, actually, give them credit twice over. Not only did they not ignore me, but the staff member I asked about keyboards for iPads, got out her phone and showed me the Amazon listing for the non-Apple one she’d bought herself.

On and off, I may have spent an hour with her as I tried out some things and she got different experts over to help me. In the two main cases, those experts eventually figured out that the reason I couldn’t do something was that the iPad didn’t do it.

I’d feel good about that. I like a tiny, tiny reputation I have in very, very small circles about being able to find the limits of things being tested. And here I was, immediately pushing at the edges of what the Final Cut Pro video editing app and the Logic Pro audio editing app can do.

Except it really was about an hour I spent there. I found out every detail about the main woman’s university course that it was conversationally polite to find out. I asked her technical questions that I think she enjoyed answering — and seemed to clearly enjoy that I genuinely didn’t know and so was paying full attention.

Only, at the end of the hour, I shook her hand and I vow to you she had not thin clue who in the hell I was.

I should’ve nicked an iPad and seen what happened.

Presenter tense

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I’m just wondering when TV presenters became more interesting than what they’re presenting — or rather, when they think they did. And when producers encourage them.

I think there is an incredible, just incredible fear that people won’t watch anything. We have to be told that this is interesting, by a bloke — it’s usually a bloke — who stands in the way of whatever it is. There’s the turn to camera that says gosh, this is exciting and I’m wonderful. Here’s the dialogue to camera saying what’s next is really interesting, immediately followed by the dialogue to camera saying what you just briefly glimpsed was really interesting, and I’m wonderful.

Or you’ll recognise this. “It’s morning now, but in ten hours the whole day is meant to turn into night. Can the day make it in time?” Entirely, derisibly false pressure — “it’s hotting up now” — over something that would actually be pressured, that would actually be really interesting, if we could just please see it.

Some presenters are worse than others, true. Some have gone to that school where they are trained / to speak only / three words at / a time in / case we can’t / follow what they / are saying now. To which I have to tell you / I have screamed./

Then Giles Coren used to make me wish for the TV set to be divided into two. He co-presented “Amazing Hotels” with chef Monica Galetti who actually knew what she was talking about. If you ever had the smallest doubt that Coren was clueless, you only had to wait a few minutes before he would tell you that he was and seem to think this is something we should be really interested in watching for an hour.

Or Gregg Wallace. Now persona no grata for his behaviour, I can count the number of tiimes I saw a listing for a documentary that sounded really – oh, it’s him. Never mind. It was twice, actually.

There’s definitely an argument that I present too much in my 58keys YouTube channel, but I’m only on that because I’m cheap and available. I’ve been introduced at events as the finest writer we could find in our price range and I want that as a poster quote.

This is all on my mind because the other day I heard Kirsty Wark presenting on BBC Radio 4 and I couldn’t help thinking yes, that’s how it should be done. Or recently the podcast 99% Invisible celebrated its 15th anniversary by interviewing the show’s presenter, Roman Mars. He was literally the subject of the episode, and yet without dodging questions, he made it be about the topics the series has covered.

I’m minded of the seven pilot episodes I made of 58keys as I tried to concisely convey why anyone should listen to me on whatever the topic is. Every one of those was thrown away and I have never since tried to justify the series, I just get on with it and trust that either you’ll find the subject interesting or you’ll find something better to watch.

Next week’s 58keys is about Shortcuts on the Mac, iPhone and iPad, and you’re already thinking of watching a dozen Philomena Funk short clips instead. But I promise you, if you were to watch, you wouldn’t hear me saying this is really interesting and I’m wonderful.

Writer economics

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I was going to build to this but it’s you, I’ll just go there. Recently I went to Paris, bought a pack of ten metro tickets online, and I’ve still got six left. Consequently I have decided it would be a terrible waste of about 12 euros if I don’t go back to use them up.

In a few weeks’ time, I will. I’m going to Paris on my first-ever writing retreat, the first despite a very long time now of being a writer. 

For reasons passing understanding, I mentioned that I was considering doing something like this, I mentioned it in an online chat and I think I even said it on 58keys, my YouTube channel. Wherever I said it, two things happened. One was that I got a Buy Me a Coffee donation expressly to be spent making the retreat happen, which was startlingly fantastic. And the other was that I was told by a friend that he’d been on a writing retreat where he was the sole person who wrote while every single other person — and every other married person too — spent the entire time in what he described as a hurricane of sex.

So I’ve decided I need a writing retreat. 

But rather than go on some organised one and, you know, maybe learn anything, instead I really have booked a hotel in Paris. First I’d thought I’d just stay at home, switch my phone to stun, and write away in my office. Then I figured no, I’d go to Bath instead and have a fanboy’s great time going around places Jane Austen has written about. Then I considered London, too.

And there’s a writer I so nearly ended up working with that on emailing to say it was a shame that project didn’t turn out, I offered to buy him lunch some time. I’ve nothing to tell you, I said, and nothing to ask, which turned out to be handy because he hasn’t replied.

Possibly I shouldn’t have told him about the hurricane of sex.

Anyway. I considered Edinburgh. It’s a fine city. Cardiff is great. I mean, Cardiff Bay and that beautiful Millennium Centre, fantastic.

But I spotted a connection here and realised that I was looking at cities because I need cities. I realised I was looking for anywhere other than the city I live in, because this much is certain: if I stayed in or even near Birmingham, then the smallest breeze would send me right back to my office.

Instead, I’m going to be alone in the 19th Arrondissement of Paris and I’m going to visit the cafe from “Before Sunset”, but otherwise I will be writing and writing and writing.

It’s an indulgence, and spending a lot of money to not waste 12 euros is possibly questionable. But when this comes up in a few weeks’ time, it will be after an extra-busy time, and it will be right before another extra-busy time.

I’d ask if you want to come with me, but that suddenly seems awkward.