I have a confession: my publishers sold the serialisation of my book to the Daily Mail. I've always hated the Mail's politics but I read it every day to blow the steam out of my ears
I am still thinking of that extraordinary weekend, ushered in by the Sturm und Drang of frightened ordinary people (ie, neither politicians nor soldiers) organising themselves into worldwide marches for peace, which for a while pierced the horrid miasma of fear under which the whole world has been cowering for far too long.
Never mind the wretched "Yes, but - " thoughts that filled my mind as I watched TV, being too damned crippled to walk further than the end of my road to march myself. Thoughts like "Yes, but - what do we do to deal with Saddam without a war?" and "Yes, but - what would have happened if we'd let Hitler carry on without a war?" and so forth. Just watching all those good, caring, hopeful people made me want to weep. I rather think I did.
The second most extraordinary thing for me this week, however, has been the way my own life has tipped itself upside down and become a prolonged ego trip of the most exhausting but - I can't deny it - occasionally exhilarating nature. To go through the hoops of book promotion at a time when a large part of me wants to think only of what may be about to happen to our world is ambivalence on the hoof. But I am grateful. It is something else to think about.
When I was persuaded last year, not only by a publisher I greatly admire but also by my own kith and kin, to write my autobiography, I gave barely a thought to what would happen when it was published. For years, I've travelled umpteen miles and worn myself to shreds addressing esoteric conferences, even sometimes paying my own expenses when the event was for an impoverished charity, because when they phone in January to book me for October, I think: "I'll be dead by then." So far, I have survived. Accepting this contract gave rise to a similar denial of what might be to come.
Which is why I now face several weeks of belting about the country as though my knicker elastic is caught on the kitchen doorknob. My publisher has sent me a list of what I am to do that makes me blench if I read it all at once. So I don't.
Photographs are the worst part. I must face the bloody lens, forcing myself to smile and look happy until my teeth dry and threaten to fall out. One of last week's photographers told me not to beam in my normal fashion but to "allow an enigmatic smile to play about [my] lips". I yearned to hurl my most favoured curse at him ("May your genitals wither and drop off"), but saved my breath. I might need it. Today's photographer, however, is a great chap, and at the end of the session we share a ham sandwich and gossip agreeably. Will he send me some pictures as requested? He promises he will, but it's doubtful. I always ask (so that I have some I can use - with permission, of course - and not be photographed again, as I hate it so) and am always disappointed.
I am taken to a handsome book warehouse in the depths of bosky Essex, where I am to sign - wait for it - 1,000 copies of the book, which is to be published on 6 March.
They are wonderful people. Lay on a tasty lunch, provide masses of smooth running pens - and tell me casually that John McEnroe had signed 3,000. So I have to compete (it's a nasty trait that bedevils me) and end up signing 1,560 copies. I only stop when they run out of books; most are gone to the bookshops. Which cheers me greatly, even though it is now my right arm that is about to wither and drop off. To be interviewed by several experienced and tip-top professionals who, for all their skill, still manage always to ask exactly the same questions soon stops being an ego trip and becomes a source of embarrassment. "Am I really this banal?" I ask myself, as I listen to what I have to say.
The daily newspaper serial begins today and I am off in earnest on the book-selling business. And a confession about the serialisation. My publishers sold the rights to the Daily Mail, and I have to admit I cringed. I have always hated the Mail's politics. They make me seethe - but I read the paper every day just to blow the steam out of my ears and to ensure that I know what its astronomical number of readers are being exhorted to believe. And also because it is undeniably one of the best pieces of newspaper-making in the business. Slick and sleek and very clever, blast them.
They treated my book extremely well. Cut the text sensibly, left in as much as possible of my own style and occasional jokes and even picked rather good pictures. They also left in the bits that I expected them to cut - like the way I loathe Tories and am a paid-up republican and so forth. I dare say they will soon publish something that will make me weep tears of frustrated rage, but right now, I have to thank them for giving me a fair old send-off.
And I need it, I realise, as I study the schedule. Literary lunches hither and yon in London, Edinburgh, Dublin, Belfast and Leicester inter alia. TV and radio all over the place and lots of bookshop signings.
And the best of all: an interview by a teen magazine on my opinion of trainers. This is because I have made it into rhyming slang (Claire Rayner = a pair of trainers. Very gratifying for an old cockney). But I shall be fretting over the Iraqi situation whatever I'm doing, damn it. Won't we all?
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