I do love my new flat.  The walls are painted bespoke vanilla mist (I love that word although I'm not entirely sure what it means - bespoke, not walls).  'Yes vanilla mist' I said to the man who came to mend the boiler the other day although to be fair he had only asked me to pass him a torch.  But he was kind enough to reply, 'Looks like magnolia to me.'

There is a big window in every room and amazingly I have a bit of outdoor space - a large balcony with lush billowing plants and an obese pigeon who swoops down every morning to sit fatly on the iron  fence.  The Girl has made friends with a feral squirrel who darts into the garden every morning and ransacks the 'squirrel proof' bird feeder.   Last week I yanked out shelves in one room, drilled holes in walls and put them into another room.  They haven't creaked and fallen off the wall yet.  I was rigid with tension for the first few weeks, expecting something - anything to collapse or stop working or to discover that America's Most Wanted was living in the wardrobe.  In fact the dishwasher politely waited until I'd moved in - worked once and then groaned to a halt, and the boiler flashed at me red-eyed, like the end of Terminator and then died too.  But worrying stupidly about some nameless possibility is never as bad as the reality of some machine just ceasing to work.  Although I suspect that had the boiler gone AWOL on a freezing February night I might have felt differently.

In the middle of all this nesting I'm supposed to be writing a new radio series so once a week I gather up my laptop and head off to the new BBC in Portland Place.   Walking up to this mammoth iconic structure of steel and glass, it's impossible not to feel a tweak of pride.   Inside, it reminds me of a combination of Bladerunner and CBeebies - huge glass walls, steel lifts and dotted with primary coloured furniture that doesn't look terribly comfortable.  It's only half full, so there are great open planned swathes of office, with empty desks.  Every week, my producer books a room with typewritten notes on the door and everything and every week, we discover somebody already in there who glares at us or says: 'Just a mo' and then carries on talking loudly on his phone.  There's something about the place that makes me feel exposed.  Maybe that's the idea.

My week with the boiler

The only real writing I've been doing recently is filling in large numbers on cheques.   Because as you know, dear reader, moving into a new place means peering into dark corners to find out where that strange clanking noise is coming from, or going red and saying: 'I don't know' when the Electrical Engineer shows up and asks you where the electricity is switched off from.  Further humiliation ensues when after spending two hours reading Boiler Maintenance Made Easy, you still have no idea why the red button is flashing so you ring up Boilerz and after half an hour of selecting 'Option 2: If you want to throw your boiler off a cliff' - someone answers and says: 'Oh no - that brand of boiler doesn't flash - it glows.'  Round comes a teenage boy who scratches his arse for ten minutes before informing you that despite 'specialising' in the type of Boiler you have ie Shit Boilers Inc, they don't have the part you need, so will have to drive to Reading to get said part, at a cost of £80 plus VAT per hour.

Teething troubles I suppose and although a good friend has pointed out that it would be infinitely worse if I had discovered the boiler wasn't working one late night in January, rather than July (even though the weather seems identical - don't get me started) I feel that the last month has been a bit of a fiery baptism.  I'm not good at understanding technical hoohaa and these Technical Manuals are Very Badly Written and utterly confusing.  Added to that is the wealth of TV programmes featuring hard men chasing Bad Tradesmen down the street, leaving a trail of weeping, and bankrupt pensioners, and you are left thinking that men who come round to your house to fix stuff are Nearly Always Crooks.

Of course this isn't true at all.  And so in the spirit of being a bit thick about this stuff and innumerate here are a few tips on getting in tradesmen when stuff breaks down.  Told you I wasn't technical:

The two excellent tradesmen I've hired recently both recommended a site called DIY Not which is full of really useful tips from professionals and DIY experts.

I had my electrics sorted out from a company I found through Which.  If you need some unbiased, consumer led guidance on who to hire and what to buy, you can't do better. They also have a section on recommended tradesmen.

Whatever job you need doing, always ask for at least three quotes in writing.  If they baulk forget it.  Never ever pay upfront for a job.  Or agree to a lower rate for cash.

It's also reasonable for a professional to have a clear idea of how long it will take for them to do the job.

If at any point you don't understand what your trades person is talking about, say so.  Ask them to explain and write it down because it is boring and you will forget it.  But I am now proud to say that like Father Purcell in Father Ted (the most boring priest in the world, I can now hold my own in the world of boilers).  Do you still fancy me?

I'm back! And with a Mallen Streak!

Does anyone remember The Mallen Streak?   Catherine Cookson meets vampiric white slug on the on the front of hair?  Sometimes it can look sexy as with Caitlin Moran or not as in the case of the bloke on the front cover of the Mallen book who looks like a cross between Michael Bolton and Wolf man (not sure which is worse.)

Anyway the POINT is that I've got one.   A Mallen streak.  A big grey one at the front of my hairline.  Possibly through the sheer stress of moving house.  Or maybe because I've got a hitherto untapped streak of badness.  'Or it could be that you're really really old mummy,' as The Girl pointed out the other day before going outside and doing a handstand in her knickers.

It could be.  But then moving house is unbelievably stressful as well as time consuming.  It's not the actual physical business of moving your stuff from one location to another - it's the getting of the mortgage, the realisation that although banks have no trouble squandering our money, when it comes to lending it, they are still firmly back in the 1950s, by which I mean they look at anyone who doesn't have a 9 - 5 regular job with a solid income - with horror.  And considering that jobs like this just don't exist anymore and most of us are on contracts, and even more of us are self-employed, you would think that a tiny amount of flexibility would be called for.  So although I had a pretty decent deposit, I still had to jump through more hoops than a circus dog and with the aid of a good mortgage broker.   No wonder everywhere I look, people are renting.

I did find throwing stuff out very therapeutic though - even books.  I always felt guilty about chucking out books, it has this Nazi esque connotation to it - the next step down from burning books.  But I knew I was moving to a flat and many of my books felt connected to my past so I gave loads away, recycled the rest and only kept the books that make me look intelligent I love and cherish.

So I've moved house and am now in that stage of finding out how things work (or don't) while working on my next Radio 4 thing, a series.  But I'm acutely aware that I've been neglecting my blog where I moan and whinge constantly write about my fascinating life.  So I'm back and Mallen Streak or not, I'm going to write a lot more from now on.  

Recording Eggy Doylers

I had a play commissioned by the BBC in March 2011. I wrote the first draft back last summer and it was frankly awful. It’s set in 1979, a few months after Mrs Thatcher came to power and what you have to avoid is info dump about that period of time:


Good morning! And it’s a fine morning in June 1979 and goodness me we have a female Prime Minister. 


Do we? And here’s a pint of milk that cost me 15p. 

CUE: Ian Drury and the Blockheads I do like that Ian Drury. Is he Top of the Hit Parade? Etc.

I wrote a second, third, fourth and by the fifth draft it was starting to get some sort of shape. My producer is very hands on which I like – I gave her carte blanche to cut and change anything she didn’t like. Because I trust her. Some writers hate this. I respect that because for most writers, a word or a phrase is there because it is necessary and it may well impact on a scene later if it’s cut or changed. I’m not quite so bothered possibly because I spent years as a journalist and in that field, writing is often cut to ribbons. I learnt not to be too precious about my writing.  Or maybe I'm just a lazy arse.  Not that distress over heavy handed chopping is precious – but sometimes you get writers in a rage because an ‘and’ or a tiny joke is cut.

The play is about an absolute disaster of a school trip. I initially called it The Ambassadors because I remember that teachers in a vain attempt at good behaviour warned us that we might be out of school but we were still Ambassadors for our school. But then I worried about listeners tuning in expecting an adaptation of a Henry James book and instead find screeching teenagers and even worse behaved teachers. So I changed it to Eggy Doylers which was a generic term of abuse at my school. Nobody really knew what it meant but apparently if someone was prone to bouts of fury, shouting Eggy Doyler at them was guaranteed to push them over the edge. And because the BBC get millions of ideas they tend to get glued to a particular title.  I'm writing a series at the moment and the Commissioning Editor hates my working title.  He wants something more war like - and proactive.  I know what he means but I'm completely stuck.  It's about romance writing and smuggling and World War Two.  So far I've come up with Mills and Boom.  Don't think that will do.

Last Tuesday and Wednesday I trooped along to what look like army barracks in Maida Vale but are the BBC recording studios. The paint job reminded me of Wandsworth Prison as did the two unimpressed looking people at reception. ‘I’m here for a play’ I said tearing in the door at 9.10am. ‘So is everybody’ came the nonchalant reply. I was late and keen to get my Visitor card but they couldn’t find a pen. They slightly reminded me of the time I staggered up the steps of the maternity hospital at 11pm, stomach protruding about five foot, in labour and the Security Guard at the door eyed me suspiciously and said: ‘What are you here for?’

The actual recording room looks like The Enterprise with huge banks of knobs and machines to twiddle. The acting takes place in what looks like a half finished episode of Changing Rooms, with bits of wood and a few chairs lying around. In the middle of this are the studio managers who gamely rustle bits of paper or crush biscuits or clang on things to create the sound magic that in turn creates the pictures in your head. It was wonderful and oddly surreal to hear the words I coming out of actors mouths. In many cases bits were funny that I couldn’t remember being funny and in one case – a whole scene that I thought would be hilarious, off the page was about as funny as a triple bypass. Kill your babies I thought as we cut the scene entirely and fiddled around with the next one so it made sense.

The cast were gorgeous and generous with the endless retakes. My producer Jonquil Panting has an uncanny ability to tell you how good you are while wringing another rewrite/take out of you. It's not till much later that you realise you've been schmoozed into doing it again and again and again. The fab cast includes - Ralph Ineson, Lydia Leonard, Joseph Drake, Amaka Okafor, and Alex Lanipekun. And I’m in it doing a cruel (and accurate) impersonation of a girl I used to know at school. Meanwhile the Studio Managers were playing bits of music from that year and reminiscing about Gary Numan and his constant farewell tours and how everybody fancied Chrissie Hynes. It’s done and it’s in editing. And it will be transmitted on Tuesday May 22nd at 2.15pm. And I’d like to say for the record that BBC coffee is unbelievably bad.

If a tree falls in a forest . . . .

Philosophical questions. If a tree falls in a forest and nobody is around to hear, does it still make a sound?

And if a writer remains oblivious to all my advice and constructive criticism and carries on in her own inimitable style – is her story still shite?

I tutor someone – let’s call her Daria, who for months now, has submitted chapter after chapter of her novel. I read and make notes, offer suggestions and encouragement. Then I start to notice that despite effusive thanks for my comments, they are being roundly ignored and the next chapter is full of exactly the same problems, overwriting, long sentences that require oxygen to read out loud, plot anomalies, too much description and passive writing.
Daria continues to ignore my suggestions thanking me for my help after each chapter. In a last ditch attempt to get through to her, I write notes in CAPS explaining that if one of your characters breaks a leg she can’t be seen RUNNING in the next chapter. The readers will NOTICE. And since you have built the entire story around the broken leg you can’t go back and change it to a SPLINTER. This too is ignored so I give up and make bland polite remarks.
Then when the final chapter is done she sends me an email thanking me for my help and asking if I will write her a really good review as she is going to send the unrevised, unrewritten and frankly awful book to a publisher. She even suggests words I might like to use in my review. (I have a few in mind but not the ones she is considering.) I am staggered at her brass neck and say I wouldn't give you a good review if there was a gun to my head no.
I go to her website a few days later and find she has a FAQ which includes the question:
How can I find out more about Daria's books?
Go into your local bookshop and demand that they stock them!
No - it is not meant to be ironic.

After I scrape my chin off the floor I can’t help but feel faintly admiring. I would never have the cheek to ask for a rave review. Or even imagine that people have nothing better to do than go to obscure blogs, and feel an urge to march into Waterstones and shout: Hey you – overqualified bookseller! Why aren’t you stocking the books of that fantastically talented author called Daria! I'm not leaving until you do!
Where does my student get her dazzling sense of entitlement? Because if she could tie that to actual writing and rewriting ability she would be unstoppable. Think of all the celebrities out there who have no discernible talent whatsoever but are considered a valuable brand.
But wait! That phrase . . . .actual ability . . . actual ability . . . actual ability . . .
I blink slap myself round the cheek a couple of times and realise that answer to the second question is definitely YES.