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Ceaseless prattle about the self becomes too attractive for comfort. Suppose I never stop? An enforced spell in a Trappistine convent may be needed
Talk, talk, talk; self, self, self. A publisher's publicity round can be disconcerting for one who was brought up not to begin sentences with the word "I", and I'm in the midst of one. Worse, ceaseless prattle about the self becomes too attractive for comfort. Suppose I never stop? An enforced spell in a Trappestine convent may be needed, but I believe even there the law of silence has been abolished and the nuns are now encouraged to let it all out. "But what do you feel, Sister Teresa, what do you feel?"
Monday: a crowded week ahead. When will I ever get any writing done? First, a "State of the Arts" debate held at the South Hampstead School for Girls, together with Gerald Kaufman, Janet Suzman, Alan Yentob, Sir Charles Mackerras, Roger White, and Melvyn Bragg. Once I was a schoolgirl here. Now look! On the platform, if never on the Honour Boards. Gerald Kaufman, in his elegant pale suit and pastel tie, asks how many in the audience have the new BBC Digital channel, and practically everyone puts their hands up. In that case, says Kaufman, the entire nation's digital TV ownership is concentrated in London NW3. Those of us on the platform claim that everything in our particular section of the cultural garden is blooming; it's only the other parts that are turning to mud. The audience take leave to doubt it.
Tuesday: to the launch party of my book at 11 Carlton House Terrace - once I worked here as a temporary assistant clerk for the Foreign Office at £6 a week - now taken over by the ICA. The arts are creeping up on us everywhere: once this building housed spies. Now look! Every creative writing course in the land, and they are myriad, is stuffed with wannabe arts administrators taking modules.
Wednesday: from Heathrow to Dublin early, more interviews, more talk about the self, a book signing among the fork-lift trucks in the distributor's warehouse. Thursday: on to Belfast. I'm one of a group of writers at an Amnesty fund-raising; again, it is a full, enthusiastic house; around the corner there may be rioting, but here all is peace and goodwill to all men, especially abroad.
Friday: an opportunity to read in the Belfast departure lounge because of a computer breakdown at Heathrow. But when do I get any writing done? Dr Theodore Dalrymple, writing in the Daily Telegraph, would obviously rather I didn't. Sensibly lambasting the NHS for publishing a book called The Gift, he singles out a story of mine as "so shallow, silly and insincere that it makes E Phillips Oppenheim look like Tolstoy".
Unnerved, I reach for my agent. It's rather a good story, he says. His problem is: how did it come to be in this book? How indeed? I think back. Last year, I got a request from the English and literary studies department at Warwick University to donate a story about the national health service, for a forthcoming publication designed to cheer up health workers. I do have an NHS story to hand, I'd written back, but I doubt it will suit your purposes - a fantasy written by someone who has spent all too many hours in the mad house of casualty, and involving wicked triage nurses. But I will send it to you for your entertainment. I posted it. Nobody replied. I forgot. Then The Gift comes through the post, and in it my inappropriate story. Hot on its heels come Dr Dalrymple's remarks.
Two things, good doctor. Oppenheim - a friend of my grandfather, though no John Buchan - wrote well enough to entertain his vast public. As for insincerity - you scatter slurs from behind a name not your own, but I know what the real one is. I shall not reveal it this time, since I usually read your columns with pleasure and approval, but I do not expect any more trouble.
I am more seriously disconcerted by Chris Patten's definition of democracy in an article in another magazine. Democracy is, he says, "about involving people in the political process, connecting them to the decisions that shape their lives". Really? In both the Oxford and the American Heritage dictionaries, the definition of democracy is "government by the people or by their elected representatives". In Chris Patten's new European world, the definition fails: it is the bureaucracy which rules, and deigns to "involve" the people. Nor is there any mechanism, as there was in our old-style, two-party, confrontational democracy, for throwing governments out if they lose their wits, declare an unpopular war or turn suicidal. What is to become of us?
Daniel Hannan, MEP for South East England (biggish unit, that), does nothing to reassure when he points out in a Sunday newspaper that the time limit for a "speech" in the European Parliament is two minutes, and the normal length is 90 seconds; that voting sessions are crammed into three days a month; and rarely more than 30 MEPs out of the 625 turn up. The European Parliament - as is our own, increasingly - is a face-saving device, while the real business of government goes on behind closed doors. Why anyone makes comparisons to the US, I can't imagine? "Europe" is far more like a fresh attempt at the USSR.
Fay Weldon's autobiography, Auto da Fay, is published by Flamingo (£15.99)
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