Excuse me while I rant

We all know someone like this. Come on. You know who I mean. Every family, workplace and neighbourhood has one. They are the easily offended, grudge-bearing, martyrs. They bleat on and on about this and that; the terrible events of the year nineteen hoo-hoo and how it pained them. They hold their self-pity like a bunch of flowers, ready to hand over to you as soon as you say, 'So how are you today?'

Pathologically self-obsessed they never think to ask how you are doing. It's just an on-going me-fest for these folk. Well I've had it with the Permanently Aggrieved. 'Cos they suck. Big time. And to them I say: go get a life or find some place else to whinge......Rant over.

Nicole follows Paris to jail

Did you see this headline? All that money, priviledge and status seems to go hand in hand with huge excess and a profound dislike of the conscious self.

If I had all that money I would want to be sober enough to enjoy the experience.

What's the betting that we don't see more and more of these celebrity incarcerations? Prison will soon be the new black.

The Secret of Happiness

Every night an angel comes to whisper the secret of happiness in my ear. But it slips out of my mind when morning comes near. Very soon, I'll remember...

Water water

Four days of flooding. Severn and Avon converged. Panic buying of bottled water. Drought. Evacuations. Homes and businesses evacuated. Agricultural land under water. This is England, in the summer of 2007.

Nii Ayikwei Parkes

Poet, writer, essayist. I have heard him on the radio but today I started to read an excerpt of his novel 'Afterbirth' (New Writing 15) . What a beautiful writer you are Mr Parkes. When I get good, I want to write just like you.

(belated) Happy Birthday To Me

Surely another year is no reason to cheer?

I am learning, that each decade or set of seven years reveals some life lesson that is useful for the next seven or ten years to come. My body and face show that time is passing. Thus far my voice has remained. But that too will turn as part of a beautifully created script; playing out as it should.

I passed a book to a friend of mine the other day. 'Stolen Lives' depicts the plight of the Ouffkir family and is a fascinating story spanning many years in captivity. It is not a book that (in my view) is particularly well written but it is a story that must be read. Just a few pages in to the novel, my friend told me she found the narrator pompous and arrogant. By the end of the novel she praised the clever way in which the voice changed as narrator told of the family's struggle to survive.



How must a character's Voice change to show the passage of time or circumstance? That the character has somehow been irrevocably changed by a one time event or series of troubles? Many characters have the same voice throughout a novel. Readers are only aware of the passage of time or a character's change of perspective via internal dialogue or action but I think a well executed voice is writing gold dust.

Hold this for me, I'm coming...

My heart goes out to the parents of the two girls arrested in Ghana this week. They thought their daughters were on a school trip to France. But for three thousand pounds the girls travelled to Ghana to pick up laptop bags filled with cocaine.

I must have been sixteen myself, when I first read news stories of young Ghanaian girls duped by their boyfriends into carrying drugs into the UK. There was a period when the Ghanaian newspapers were filled with photographs of these girls arrested at Kotoka International airport. The photographs showed the girls with taped plastic bags filled with drugs, wrapped around their bodies. One girl died after swallowing a bag of cocaine which burst in her stomach. The saddest thing was that these girls were pawns driven by their desire to make money or gain the respect or acceptance of their peers.

Even so, I have been hugely irritated by some of the opinion and media coverage about these arrests.

A Fair Trials Abroad representative complained on Radio Four that the girls should have been allowed to re-enter the UK to be arrested here because they don't speak the language in Ghana... On another news programme, the girls Tottenham neighbours expressed their concern for the girls because there are cockroaches in Ghana....

This from people with distinctly West Indian accents - so we can assume they have absolutely no clue about Ghana - who live in Tottenham.

But back to the issue at hand; sharp intake of breath: Ghana was a British colony; English is the official language. Yes, of course the girls would be better off here, but they committed a crime in Ghana.

What does it say about Ghanaian justice if the police just turn a blind eye and send the two girls back because they are sixteen? I am sure the Ghanaians are just as anxious to prevent drug trafficking as we are here in the UK. They would want to find out where the girls got the laptop bags. And why should'nt they? Funnily enough when people are arrested in Thailand we don't have this level of hue and cry. Could it be that Ghana is coming under this level of scrutiny because people just don't know what to expect from that country?

Over the next few days and with this level of media interest, I am sure the girls will be sent back here. But we do not make their case any easier by criticising the Ghanaian officials for doing their job.

FGM

It's summer time! 500 UK based young girls will be taken back to their ancestral homes in Africa or the Middle East to be circumcised. Of all the laws and policies mandated against this too old barbaric practice, it is only the most eligible young men of those countries and cultures who can guarantee its complete eradication. All they have to do is refuse to marry a girl who has been circumcised.

First Do No Harm

You are a bright child. You do well at school. You tell people that you want to be a doctor. This makes them smile with pride, for you come from a country that values its doctors. You go to university, study for many years, become a doctor. Your medical qualification brings respect, status, money. You are mobile. You can leave your country, travel the world and make a good living from healing the sick. You can do all this, and so much more. Instead, instead, you try to blow up a busy nightclub. When that fails you drive a blazing car into an airport. Why??

On Attraction

A look, a smile. Something tells you wait a while, this could be, interesting for me. Other times, you don't see it. But it's there. Creeping up on you; breaking through. You laugh out loud alone in your room; you'll feed your attraction again and soon; then one day kaboom! You're hooked.

I've just finished reading a book I expected to love. Everyone else is raving about this book. Calling it a tour de force. It will sell by the bucket load. And win a few prizes too no doubt.

And why not? It has much to recommend it: crystal clear prose, technical brilliance. Linear and dynamic, it is thoroughly believable.

Yet, it left me thinking: so what? I tried again, willed myself; even tried to fake it....but no. After a while I realised that it was the characters. Although well drawn and recognisable, they had no spark. Nothing to commend them. I didn't hate or like them. They were just - and I love this word - bleurgh.

Creating attractive - not necessarily likeable - compelling characters must be one of the biggest challenges in modern fiction. To get it right, I try to create rounded characters with a little something that readers can appreciate and hold on to. If I don't find the characters attractive, my readers won't either. So this is the last test for my almost nearly there manuscript.

And in fiction as in real life, it is best if that 'something' goes beyond the physical.

Terror Alert

Two in London and one in Glasgow. Glasgow? At least now we know. A huge first test for Gordon Brown and Jacqui Smith. For the rest of us, it's the shock of knowing that these people are organised and outside London. These are scary times indeed. Be vigilant out there people.