My new life in the country is very peaceful. I have spent the past two months writing my first novel. I can't say I've been in the midst of a creative tornado, but I'm proud to announce that the first paragraph is complete. It's about a fabulously well-endowed, skinhead rent boy. I planned to write it free-form, not knowing the outcome but confident that my imagination would resolve all in the end. My editor disagreed and demanded a breakdown of the intended plot.
I am expected to deliver (like a pregnant farmyard sow) in early August. This seems unlikely, so I have taken the precaution of making the hero of the book a serial killer who is also a TV personality. He writes a novel (which is really a true story) and the day he delivers the last chapter his editor is pushed under a train, the final victim. I'm not anticipating too much pressure.
Such endeavours are usually encouraged by solitude and quiet. My agent helpfully restrains herself from calling me with exciting TV offers, and sensitive friends have clearly resigned themselves to communicating by silent e-mail.
This week, in a spare moment, I took a detached look at my life and found it, unsurprisingly, wanting in excitement. My heart rate went up a bit the other day when a bee flew in the window and buzzed angrily around the room, but that's been about it. I tried watching the World Cup: I've seen on the news crowds of exuberant young people flushed with celebratory spirit, but nothing much stirred in me. I enjoy football only when the players spit, and there's been far too little of that in my view. I've even contemplated growing a beard in the hope that 250 armed policemen might crash into my bedroom in the early hours, but knowing me I'd probably sleep through it.
I thought about going to London to look at a bus or maybe witness a stabbing, but unless I can call my visit research, it cannot be justified.
Phil and Fern came to my rescue with an offer I couldn't refuse: an opportunity to appear on This Morning for a five-minute interview. Fern appeared to be wearing an Ann Summers top and was exuding Mother Earth hormones so copiously that everyone in the studio, cameramen included, was swooning with infantile contentment. Miraculously, I got through it without referring to copulation and resisted the urge to nuzzle up to Ms Britton's ample cleavage. It was a triumph all round.
While in the vicinity, I decided to visit my "special" doctor. She, in the pursuit of youth, administers a variety of treatments, hands out magic potions and lotions, and can fill in facial cracks as and when they appear. On my last visit she talked darkly of a new type of hormone replacement treatment for men which involves injecting yourself nightly in the thigh. "It makes your body think it's 26 again," she said.
My body can think what it likes; I'm not jacking up in the bathroom of an evening for anybody.
I decided instead to give myself a detox and stop drinking alcohol. My liver has been a real trouper, but I suspect the poor sodden organ is barely functioning, just twitching about inside me like a dying fish on the deck of a tug.
"Nil by mouth" isn't a phrase that has ever featured in my vocabulary, but so far so good. It just means the whole day feels like an extended morning. Without the cocktails and the snifters and the nightcaps and the ones for the road, it's hard to know where you are in the 24-hour cycle. I'm not saying I drank a lot, but how can you be sure it's bedtime if you don't keel over? There's just one worry: if careless vigilante types mistake paediatricians for pederasts, might they also confuse sobriety with sodomy? Tony Blair for the Prime Minister?
