mns  2007-03-26 18:18   

In January, having gone through my first ever audition, I got job I wanted - to read my novel Searching for Home for CD. My other novels are all available on audio but JC, (Renaissance Man incarnate) suggested I put myself forward to read this. I did the audition just before Christmas, absolutely sure I would be rejected, but to my amazement they said ‘Yes’. And not only yes to Searching for Home but also for The Lost Garden.
So, every day for a week I trekked by foot and train for an hour and a half to south-west London and I recorded and recorded.
Day One, I thought I would die of exhaustion on the way home. Three hours travelling and six hours recording and I was fit for nothing. I don’t really know how I walked the last mile home, but somehow I did; and there was JC waiting with a hot bath and a pie – yes, he made a pie, beef and ale and homemade pastry – and then I collapsed into bed.
Day Two I cried on the train on my way to the studio. I couldn’t imagine how I was going to get through the day, how my voice would hold up, how I had managed to bluff my way into this situation which I did not seem capable of handling. And then, lo and behold, it all fell into place. It became a strange and fascinating experience and I began to thrive on it. One of the strangest things about it was that I found myself back where I had been several years ago when I actually wrote the book. I wrote it at a time of great loss – the end of my marriage, the onset of a legal separation, the death of my mother… and while the book doesn’t deal with any of those topics, it most definitely deals with loss in general and survival in particular.
The next few days flew past and I felt stronger and really delighted in the work I was doing – and I know my mother would have been so pleased.

Last year I wrote an article entitled Smacking and the Nanny State in the Irish Daily Mail in which I claimed (and still claim) that good and loving parents sometimes need to give their child a smack – call it the Last Resort Slap – and that they should have that right, and that no E.U. Law, imposed by politicians who should limit themselves to measuring the curvature of bananas, should be brought in. Out of the blue The Late Late Show contacted me and asked me if I would defend the article on the show if they flew me to Dublin and put me up.
So I did. (see The Late Late Show, 2nd of February 2007)
Certainly it was a night to remember, and despite huge and terrifying nerves on my part beforehand, it was incredibly good fun and stimulating. Apart from the show itself, there was the excitement of a chauffeur-driven limousine (a complete first for both me and JC), the pleasure of meeting Jermaine Jackson, the reassurance of seeing in the audience a woman I know from the world of bridge (her presence gave me the feeling there was someone on my side, and that was very nice indeed), and then dinner with my children.

Some time ago JC and I had talked about moving out of London. We both work from home and we had the idea that we should move before summer so that we would have more air, easier access to outside, a smaller city… this was an idea, no more than that. But then we were up in Nantwich in Cheshire, and on a day trip to Chester we saw an apartment – and yes, four weeks later, we left London and are now unpacking the cases and boxes as we settle in just inside the old Roman walls that surround this amazing city. One minute’s walk up the road, just beyond the walls, a Roman amphitheatre is still being excavated. Standing on the wall looking down it is like looking into another era. A minute’s walk in the other direction, the River Dee washes past and a lone heron stands on the banks.

Before we left London last week, we saw John Mortimer in Mortimer’s Miscellany in The King’s Head Theatre in Islington. Of all the things I will miss about London, The King’s Head tops the list. We saw every play, every performance there over the last twenty-one months. My favourite had been Sartre’s Huis Clos – that is until I saw Mortimer’s Miscellany. It was wonderfully entertaining, hysterically funny, totally absorbing – the man is a genius.

Over the last couple of months I have done about a dozen radio interviews. The oddest one was about three weeks ago when we were staying with JC’s parents and the only quiet place I could find in the house to do the interview, was in bed. (JC has a dog with long claws that clatter on the wooden floorboards downstairs – and while I truly love this dog, I cannot trust her to sit in her basket while I’m on the air.) I usually pace when I’m doing radio interviews – I set up the room beforehand so that I have notes on the table in case I need mental refreshing, I have water to hand in case the mouth dries up, and a chair in case I find I need to sit. But generally speaking, I pace – I walk up and down the rug in our living room which silences my footsteps. However this wasn’t an option on the wooden floors in Nantwich, and so I took to the bed in desperation. I was afraid I’d feel the urge to pace and that the creaking of the bed would give away my whereabouts, but amazingly I felt no urge at all. I lay on the pillows like some dowager duchess – and all I can say is, that is the only place to do an interview.

Sometime in the late Nineties, the publisher, Edwin Higel, passed me a manuscript entitled ‘It Means Mischief’ and asked me for my opinion. It was written by the actress Kate Thompson and it was her first novel. She and I had briefly overlapped in Trinity College and I read it with interest as you can imagine. I hadn’t really known her at all back in Trinity days, but she and I had walked the same cobblestones, read in the same library, borrowed the same books – and so I read it with heightened curiosity. I returned it to Edwin giving it a full and enthusiastic endorsement. It was well written; it was funny; it was sexy; it had a good plot and interesting characters. He published it. It was a brilliant success, and nine novels later so is Kate. We both had stories in the collection Moments, published in aid of the Tsunami victims.

Now she has come up with a new publishing idea for her tenth novel Love Lies Bleeding, and I encourage you to visit her site for a look.