8305/21224
If you can't trust a sex trafficker who has just been moved to a nicer prison for no reason, then who can you trust?
It's just anything goes now right? I don't think there's even going to be any long term justice. I guess if anyone was going to step in they'd have stepped in by now.
We had a good run.
Trying not to think about this kind of crap on holiday of course. We avoided the I-phone-talian today by spending the afternoon in our villa. It's where he should go really if he wants to do work calls and smoke cigars - though preferably not our villa. That would really be rubbing it in.
I haven't quite finished Faulks' Sortabiography yet. Though he mentions John Updike at one point and I hope he called his autobiography "What's Updike?" Though he might have had to put "(up doc)" in the title to explain the pun. I am great at coming up with inappropriate titles for serious writers' memoirs. As it's a series of essays it's pretty easy to take a little break and read something else, so I had a little dip into
Little Alex Horne's book for children and stone clearers, "The Last Pebble" which is about beachcombers who break the second rule of Stone Clearing (you must never remove a stone from the field or beach it is on, under pain of curse). But still very good to see Horne catering to the very much unrepresented stone-curious public. Some people think you shouldn't write a kids' book on this subject (the second rule of stone clearing is that you must be at least 16 to take part), but even so I like it so far. And may not get to read the rest straight away as Phoebe has now got her hands on it.
Otherwise I am really enjoying doing pretty much nothing apart from eating and drinking - I have resisted the urge to drink booze even when Catie ordered a bottle of champagne on room service this afternoon.
The interesting thing about shutting down for a holiday is that it always inevitably leads to me having loads of new ideas. I don't know if it's because I am immersed in other people's writing. Faulks writing about an occasion where he had a dream that he kept waking from, only to discover it was still a dream - an experience I had in the week I met and started dating Julia Sawalha, a bizarre occurrence that I could reasonably assume was still a dream. Has all my life since then been imaginary? Might I wake up back in Balham at the turn of the century any moment? Might that be an interesting take on the Groundhog Day genre?
I also saw the phrase "as the crow flies" (maybe in Horne's book) and wondered if there was a kids book idea in a young crow that doesn't want to take the direct route everywhere and enjoy the journey more, but his family are worried about how that will screw up distances for humans. It's an absolutely terrible idea, but the important thing is that I am having ideas and also, after a long time of not getting my arse in my spinny chair, I am keen to get writing something this autumn. Might well still not happen. But the point is that a break from everything is a vital part of my job.
Do you think I can make holidays tax deductable?
