Call for TLC

Even as I was going down to the far south (Manchester!) yesterday I felt the sniffles coming on, and this morning I woke with the full works - raw throat, throbbing head, clogged-up nose.

As it hadn't reached my chest I did go for a little run to clear my head and it wortked for a while, but now I'm bunged up and prickly again.

Meh!

Manchester

You missed me yesterday, didn't you?

Oh go on, you know you did!

All right. Have it your own way...

I was in Manchester for a recording of BBC Radio 4's Book Club, with Val McDermid who is one of my favourite crime writers. We were discussing The Mermaids Singing. She is, how shall we put it, a solid lady who reassures me that you don't have to be young and/or glamorous to be a successful writer. She is also very good at what she does, and a delightful and funny human being. I got on very well with her before the show, and afterwards she gave me an incentive to keep writing when she promised to buy me a drink when I collect my CWA Golden Dagger!

I got a couple of questions in - one about how her experience as a tabloid journalist influenced her view of crime writing (in view of the fact that TMS features a hack whose determination to get a by-line is rather less than helpful to the police investigation and destroys a life in the way that some of us know only too well is the everyday currency of tabloid journalism.) The other referring to other books of hers - Booked For Murder, in which a writer is murdered in the style of one of her own plots, and Killing The Shadows in which she makes a fetish of the whole idea. I wondered if she had nightmares about having the sticky end she created for several characters in TMS.

The programme is to be broadcast on Sunday, 4 February and again on Thursday 8 February, both on R4 at 4pm.

Of course, while I was in Manchester I had to seize the opportunity for a BCUK meet, and I had lunch with Claire (clairemagnolia) from Blackpool with her children Owen and Willa (the mouseorganmice) in the Museum of Science and Technology.



It was raining. Manchester, after all, is famous for being rainy. Yet I don't think I've ever seen rain in Manchester before (and compared with Barrow it's positively Saharan!). Heavy snow, yes - as when I was there recording University Challenge in 1987!