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"Our sister has just murdered our mother," said the letter. "Would this be a good idea for a TV play?"

Published 26 April 1999

When I told my father that I wanted to be a writer he begged me to consider the horrible lives led by the wives of writers who are always at home, wearing a dressing-gown, stumped for words and moaning away about the delinquencies of publishers and the unfairness of critics. In the interests of preserving my wife's sanity, he urged me to take a job that got me out of the house occasionally and suggested I follow in his footsteps and become a divorce lawyer. This career not only preserved my marriage for many years, but gave me much valued material and an insight into the wilder aspects of matrimonial infidelity in Enfield and Tufnell Park.

However, the dreadful strain caused to writers' spouses was vividly demonstrated this week by the sad case of Michael Leach. Mrs Leach, who looks, from her photograph in the paper, seriously haunted, was having a bad time getting on with her book, for which the publisher's advance was, apparently, measly. Driven to desperation by this situation, Mr Leach came to the conclusion that the only way out was to murder his mother so that he and the writer might inherit her house. Naturally he thought better of it, and of course Mrs Leach and his mother forgave him at once. The Crown Prosecution Service, with its usual knack of doing the wrong thing, charged him with attempted murder. He has now escaped with a suspended sentence and is back home, looking after the children and silently making tea. I can only hand out my father's advice to Mrs Leach and all other writers. Get a job that gets you out of the house occasionally.

Apart from driving your spouse to thoughts of violence, a writer's life involves the receipt of innumerable letters, often bulky manuscripts and requests for literary advice. Having been a lawyer, I also get asked for legal advice and my dual roles were neatly combined in one letter. "I thought you would like to know," the spidery handwriting on wafer-thin paper read, "that our sister has just murdered our mother. Do you think this would be a good idea for a television play?"

We were in Florence for the opening of Franco Zeffirelli's film Tea With Mussolini. The film has been dubbed into Italian, so the English jokes I had written for Maggie Smith, which raised satisfactory laughs in London, didn't get a titter in Tuscany. However, the Florentine audience seemed to find it all extremely moving, and when the lights went up some were in tears and most of them cheered the director. The city was as beautiful as ever, the Arno full and placid and the streets already clogged with tourist parties. Making slow progress towards the Medici tombs, I was confronted by a woman carrying a child, who couldn't have been more than two years old, wrapped in a blanket. She held out her hand, into which I put a probably small amount of money. She thanked me by touching me, then covering my chest with the blanket. Safe from view in this tent, the child aimed unerringly for my inside pocket and pulled out my wallet. I recovered it from its tiny clutches and went on, thinking of a Europe in which the towns are surrounded by displaced people, maltreated gypsies, victims of ethnic cleansing or other nationalistic cruelties, with no other means of support than training children to pick pockets as the pre-nursery school part of their basic education.

Back in England I listened to a Reith lecture, telling me that thanks to the Internet and international stock markets and corporations, we were all part of something ludicrously called "globalisation" and that the nation state had ceased to exist. You can only wonder at the strangely unreal world that people who give lectures inhabit.

Sarah Kane's first play at the Royal Court, Blasted, caused critics to call it and the theatre a disgrace. This led the audience to come in droves. By the time of her second piece, Cleansed, the critics came to recognise her originality and brilliance, so the play was less well attended. Her aim, she said, was to create something beautiful out of despair, but in the end despair overwhelmed her naturally cheerful, outrageous and energetic nature and she committed suicide. This week, the Court's temporary home at the Duke of York's was crowded with her friends, admirers and fellow writers, there to pay a moving tribute to her. She was a young writer with a first in English. Apparently, at university, after her tutor called one of her essays pornographic, she threw a copy of Penthouse at him as he was lecturing, saying, "Wank over that and not over my essay". The theatre can ill-afford to lose such original talents.

Rehearsals provide the most enjoyable moments of a writer's life, and what's more they get you out of the house. I sat behind a fish-tank glass listening to such great performers as Paul Scofield, Alex Jennings and Imelda Staunton (the huge advantage of radio plays is that, as the actors don't have to learn the lines, you can get the most glittering casts) and heard water slurped in a plastic bowl become the sea and BBC technicians who were immediately able to produce the sound of a 1930s dentist's drill.

I thought back over 40 years to the moment when I first heard a line I'd written spoken by an actor in a radio drama. Such plays are difficult to write, for you have nothing but words with which to paint the scenery and define characters, but they started such writers as Harold Pinter and Robert Bolt. May radio drama never be swallowed up by the ever-declining television.

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