Benefit Street, Brighton.

  At this time of year, I like to make my vol au vents. For, the fire never be allowed to damp down completely in my oven. This be the time for to make meringues in summer; in winter 'tis a thrifty way to let it burn just a little higher a little higher for to cook pie & pastry cases. And to let us gather cosily before it to do our mending, or crafting, or story-telling. in winter. 'Tis also the time the Ladies Maids spend hours cleaning & pressing the endless mud & manure from hems of cloaks & and gowns & stocking soles. While the Bootboy, with a dull knife, hacks clods of chalk, and mud & excrement from boots and patterns alike, before ever he can polish them. It hath oft caused me to grin that what the Gentry eat and when is predicated by their Cooks & not by 'Tradition' - inasmuch as 'twere Cooks who forged the tradition! Now I know scores of receipts - not solely for meat and fowl and fish; but for possets and medicinals and ungent...

I was 26 when I wrote my first autobiography. I didn't market it as an autobiography, of course. Who's going to believe that by the age of 26 anyone would have enough material to fill a book?  The m/s kept coming back unread  because novice authors are not considered skilled enough to write in the first person - so said all the agents in South Africa at the time. On opening up the 5th refusal citing this as the reason, I kinda lost it, strode to my computer and wrote back that I didn't give a damn what some people could or could not do - only in what I could do. And I bloody well COULD write in the first person.  Thus began a wonderful relationship with Frances Bond who became my agent, and remained so until her untimely death.  But, we didn't see eye to eye on her perception of two of the characters - Phil and George.  She kept telling me to tone them down, and insisted that they were OTT as characters and the kinds of things that happened to them were so biza...

When you've spent the last five years in a fog I expect suddenly bursting back into clarity again is going to be an illuminating experience in any circumstances. To have done it in the Spring is to add all those tropes of rebirth,  and leaving the Underworld that happen to be circulating around from about March. Anyone who is not totally insensate at this time of year is genetically programmed to rise to the call of Nature triumphant. But to do it in this lockdown has proved exciting, and thrilling, and illuminating by turns - and sometimes all at the same time so I really do, like a girl in a Romcom, gasp audibly and stop in my tracks; quite often. I have twice, unconsciously, but ever so theatrically, raised a hand to my bosom while doing so. (Apart from the conviction that I was certifiable insane, the Fog really seemed to draw a sort of dark oily fuzz over the perceptions. Imagine then, what it's been like to round a bend and come face-to-face with a bawdy, lusty...

I was "chatting" to a Twitter-friend to-day who'd noticed I'm not posting much atm.(And @MrsSimpson, I believe, has followed my lead - though perhaps she's just busy with the Cholera Epidemic down there in Georgian Brighton?  ) Not given much to the terse, spare prose of the Greats I explained my current strategy to this woman whom I have never met, but whom I count as a friend. Not "Great" but at least terser and sparer, what it boiled down to was: I am not bullet-proof. Neither is anyone I love and admire. Statistically, the possibility of any of us being killed by bullets, however, is negligible in the face of You Know What.  I am thus engaged in a Cunning Plan and am fine. But of course, anxious to stress the significance of this, I had to include bits of background here and there, and to explain bits elsewhere - just to keep her up to speed. For instance: It’s a given that, even with the three week extension, I am not going to ...

I've often read how people shape their image on social media in order to appeal to a certain demographic, or a particular social strata, or to construct a desired persona for one's peers. And I've always thought - well no-one could accuse me of that.  I blab out the sorts of things which other people find best not talked about, and I write when the Black dogs on my shoulder and when I'm going to take over the world, and show little embarrassment for either. Yet, I have never written as myself in my life. I don't mean that I've hidden things. It's just that one is always constrained:by editors, by "policy", by the body which pays out, by the institution to which one belongs. Because then, overshadowing all, come the kids. At first you worry about the other mums'n'dads - will they still let their kids come over on play dates if they ever read about me bonking on the Prime Minister's desk? Then it's "Will the kids be sc...