Some people judge others by the clothes they wear, the music they like, their personal habits or the company they keep. This can be very proscriptive. In the past I’ve heard friends of mine written off by others as if they were so much rubbish.

‘Oh, I can’t possibly have anything to do with Derek/Clive/Mary/Dolores (insert name as appropriate) because he/she a) was a junkie twenty years ago, b) looks like an unmade bed, c) listens to jazz, d) has a wart.’

I expect I’ve been written off myself in similar style at least once in the past. And I fully expect it to happen again. Not that I care. People who write others off like this are morons. End of.

That said, there is one measure that is important to me when I meet someone new. I don’t judge them on it and I won’t spurn them if they fail my personal ‘test of character’, as it were. It concerns words and whether one likes them a) a lot, b) quite a bit, c) sort of, or d) not at all.

Like most writers I am a definite ‘a’ when it comes to words. I am enchanted, thrilled and very often amused to a huge degree by them. Place names, descriptive words, medical terms, new and exciting words for new and exciting things – I don’t care! I love them all and, although I would never just simply shun someone who doesn’t have an interest in words, (apart from anything else, I’d want to talk to them to find out why) such a relationship would not be easy.

So with that in mind, and because the sun is shining here in the north west of England and so I am, for once, not in the doldrums, I’d like to share some of my favourite words with you. In turn if you’d like to share your favourite words with me and anyone else who reads this stuff, then please do feel free to respond.

Prestidigitation – the act of magic, literally manipulation of the digits.

Azerbaijan – it’s a country but it’s also, to my ears, a word of the most musical beauty.

Babble – onomatopoeic heaven.

Bollocks – what rude British people like to call testicles. It’s a wonderful stress reliever. Try it! Shout ‘bollocks!’ the next time you’re angry or frustrated, you won’t be disappointed.

Pus – pus isn’t nice. It’s sticky, diseased and grim but the word is fantastic. If you elongate the double ‘s’ it has a very satisfyingly sinister ring to it.
Note: ‘Pus’ is the correct spelling. However the double ‘s’, puss, is in common usage now.

Vulnavia – Vulnavia was the name of the silent assistant of the Abominable Dr Phibes. Played by Vincent Price, Phibes, a mad scientist, featured in two camp and bizarre films from the early 1970s.

Vuvuzela – yes, I know it’s only become popular since the World Cup, but I like it.

Grimoire – a book of spells.

Bona – means lovely or handsome in ‘polari’ the old secret language of London gay people prior to legalisation of homosexuality. Some people do still use the polari even now, although it is becoming rarer.

Batman – yes, I know he’s a superhero but Batman is also a town in eastern Turkey.

Weird – I just use this a lot, probably too much.

Tango – great dance, also the name of an orange drink here in the UK. The vibrant colour of this drink is said to look like some shades of fake tan.

Yok – Turkish for ‘no’. This is absolute ‘no’, completely ‘no way I will do this’, totally, totally ‘no’. In contrast to ‘hayir’ which is also ‘no’ but with the door just very slightly open to the possibility of ‘yes’.

Knickers – people don’t use ‘knickers’ enough – if you’ll excuse the pun. It’s all ‘pants’ and ‘boxers’ or ‘thongs’ or whatever. No! ‘Knickers’ are what you put on your bum every day (or not) and that applies whether they are no more than a piece of string or a thing the size of a bed-sheet.

Jaunt – how British is this? Going out for a ‘jaunt’. It’s a trip out in a car to have a picnic or go and see some sort of monument halfway up a massive stone escarpment. Jaunts usually happen in the rain.

Ofsayd – ‘offside’ in Turkish. Clearly a loan word from English. I am not a football fan, but I love this word even if I don’t understand what it is or how it works in English or in Turkish.

Nostferatu – why say vampire when you can say ‘nostferatu’?

Prawn – love to eat them, look at them and say their name.

Wattle – wattles are the folds of loose skin that hang off the necks of domestic fowl. They can also hang from the jowls (another good word) of people when they reach a ‘certain age’. I like to think that I don’t have any myself, but I am probably just deluding myself.

Kahlua – a fantastic Mexican coffee liqueur. Mexican words in general are fantastic. Just cop a load of ‘Tijuana’ and ‘Chihuahua’.

Geezer – a man, a bloke, a proper east end term this.

Nosh – food. Yiddish, but used all over the east end of London.

Ginnel – a small lane or cut through in Lancashire.

Hepatic – to do with the liver.

Lethargy – it even sounds lazy. Say it as you recline decorously onto your sofa with your glass of Kahlua.

Balthazar – if I had been a man, this is what I would have wanted my name to be. But if Lionel Shriver can be, well, Lionel Shriver, why can’t I be Balthazar Nadal?

When I was a child one of my favourite books was ‘My Family and Other Animals’ by the naturalist, Gerald Durrell. His account of his pre-World War 2 childhood on the Greek island of Corfu was fascinating and enchanting. I loved the fact that he was surrounded by interesting and eccentric friends and relatives as well as by a whole host of animals and birds.

I always wanted to have loads of different animals when I was a child, but because I grew up in a city, that wasn’t possible. I did have eccentric friends and relatives – some of them quite off the scale even by Gerald Durrell’s standards – but not, of course, amid the bright sunlight of a Greek island. East London in the 1960s and 70s was more of a light drizzle sort of environment.

Later, as a teenager, I discovered the work of Gerald’s older brother, the novelist, Lawrence Durrell. Right from the off, I was hooked. I think it took me less than a fortnight to read ‘The Alexandria Quartet’ and I then went on to devour everything else in Lawrence’s catalogue. The intensity of the writing, the odd and often borderline abusive relationships that he described and the lush evocations of places both familiar and unfamiliar bewitched my soul. That a girl from a working class background should be so taken by tales of louche diplomatic and artistic types having affairs and exploring literary forms in places like Cairo, Avignon and Alexandria was, I guess, unusual. But then I think that probably the nature of the characters and their locations in space were probably irrelevant. What got me was the notion of people exploring.

Lawrence Durrell’s ‘Quartet’ novels are often described as ‘flawed masterpieces’. The four-part form is applauded but the result often, some feel, falls short of the original artistic intent. I am no literary critic but my feeling on the matter is that even to attempt such a thing was an act of both bravery and genius. But then that was what Durrell and his literary friends and acquaintances did.

Not all of their ideas and explorations were influential or even quite sane. Whilst staying with Durrell and his family in Corfu the author Henry Miller decided that he wanted to rebel against the tyranny of clothes by walking around in the hot Greek summer stark naked. I can’t necessarily see why anyone would want to risk such comprehensive and catastrophic sunburn, but I do applaud his effort. Why not give that a go? Why not write a massive great tome detailing a significant parcel of time from four different points of view? This, to me, is what the progression of art is all about. Exploration! When I was a very small child I wanted to be an Egyptologist and dig around in the sands of the Valley of the Kings and discover… What? Actually it didn’t matter very much. I just wanted to discover something wonderful and amazing, something that would allow me to learn a fact that, to me, was new and shiny and told me a whole previously unknown thing about the world.

As writers, whether we plough a literary or a genre fiction furrow, it is I believe incumbent upon us never to stop exploring. There is no subject that cannot be looked at, no form that can be dismissed as irrelevant, pointless or stupid. I am just about to start on my latest Çetin İkmen book that will take my character into pastures that he has never explored before. Not only will he be working in ways he has never even dreamed about, he will be meeting people and going to places he cannot even have imagined. Both his ‘life’ and mine will, I hope, be enriched by this. I hope also, very much, that the book will be a huge success. This will be for all sorts of reasons, not the least of which will be because I will have moved Çetin, and myself, on. I may not have ever found a new and fabulous tomb underneath the sands of Egypt, I may never have eschewed the tyranny of clothes, but I’m still in there trying to do new and exciting things with my fiction. So big thanks for that, as well as hours and hours of wonderful prose, to the two late Durrell brothers, Gerald and Lawrence.

İstanbul used to have some mad and spectacular backpacker “hotels” back in the day. One of my favourites was in Yerebatan Street right in the heart of the old city, Sultanahmet district. It was called the Hotel Stop and it was the kind of place where anything could happen at any time and for any number of reasons – few of them logical.

The owners of the Stop were a family originally from eastern Turkey who were some of the kindest, most caring and most ambitious people I have ever met. The building itself, which was probably built sometime in the 1920s or 30s was riddled with damp and probably every type of wood rot known to man. It was dingy, the plumbing was beyond eccentric and every time you turned on a light you took your life in your hands.

Cuts in mains water supply used to happen a lot in İstanbul, a phenomenon not always easily understood by tourists from Western Europe, the USA, Canada and Australasia. Whenever the water went off at the Stop there was always a roar of fury from those halfway through washes or trying to flush the toilet. I once got caught covered in soap, not a drop of water in sight, in what was laughingly called the shower room. This was a vast hymn to cracked tiles dominated by a massive cylindrical boiler that looked not unlike a 1950s B movie version of a spacecraft. This thing could, with help, be persuaded to emit a thin, lukewarm trickle of water from the object you were encouraged to call its ‘shower attachment’. But only with the window wide open. If you didn’t do that you’d die of carbon monoxide poisoning – not that anyone ever did. What I did do was nearly die of laughing as I lay under that bone dry space rocket that hot waterless afternoon when I was covered from head to foot in soap and shampoo. I was there, waiting and laughing, for over an hour before the water came back on.

Then there were the cats. Seemingly thousands of them. All grey and brown tabbies, all out of the same mother, an heroic old girl called ‘Little Cat’. Little Cat was one of the most loving feline mothers I have ever known. She was also very proud. Wherever you went in the Stop, Little Cat would follow you with her vast tribe of kittens hot on her heels. You had kittens in reception, kittens in the toilet, the washroom, in your bedroom and, very often, actually in your bed too. Some of the Stop’s more nervous guests would be disgusted and describe the kittens (admittedly full of fleas) as ‘disease vectors.’ But me and mine are cat people and so we just took the cats and their fleas, in our stride. They were all part of a charm that also always included a welcome that was so warm that turning up at the Stop felt like coming home. But then the owners were extraordinary people. Hoteliers and, almost to a man and woman, students too. As they worked in the crazy bedrooms and scary toilets, they studied university texts on biochemistry, physics, English and history.

In the years that I patronised the Stop I met many strange and remarkable people. These included American converts to Islam setting out on the haj to Mecca, whacked out backpackers on the road to they didn’t have a clue where, drug casualties from the 1960s, refugees from Afghanistan, appalled Western Puritans and some very charming men who were probably gangsters. However the thing that lingers most for me about the long-gone Stop, is the view I got from its shabby, probably very dangerous roof one very early morning in the summer of 1989. The sun, though hazy, was up and from the roof I could see the whole of the old city of İstanbul coming to life around me. No whizzy wazzy modern trams in those days, just the sound of the odd ancient car or bus sputtering into life and the cries of the street sellers of simit (bread rolls) and yoghurt. I remember looking out towards the great Mosque of Sultanahmet and then beyond to the Sea of Marmara and watching the seagulls veer away from the smoke that puffed out of the smokestacks of the early morning ferries. OK, I was young then, but at that moment I felt as if I could do anything and be anyone I wanted to be in my crazy, friendly, maddening and fabulous city. It is a feeling I have sadly, never been able to experience anywhere, since.

The life in and around the Stop and its denizens was just so intense that maybe that just isn’t possible. Those days have gone.

I did actually do my blog for this week before this one. But now I think that this should replace it and that next week should be reserved for a rather joyful piece about İstanbul.

I’m not looking for sympathy. I just think that people should know just how quickly the abyss of depression can open up sometimes. I was OK on Friday, looking forward to a weekend of no editing. Now it’s Sunday and I feel so worthless I can’t find a cupboard dark enough in which to hide. Something has triggered this off but now it’s going it has taken on a momentum all of its own.

Of course I know with my psychology grad head on that all this is about underlying fears and horrors that can be triggered off at the drop of a hat. But as a civilian, I still feel bewildered, appalled and amazed by how my family can even be in the same house with me. Not that I’m in the ranging around stage. I’m at the hiding, weeping place and I think that everything I have ever done is shit, a mistake and a cause for punishment.

I would like to get drunk or just shove a load of substances into myself and crawl under the table and try not to breathe. But I can’t. If I drink, it’ll never end and no one can have that, least of all me. It feels indulgent to be so weak and so full of self-loathing and all of that makes me hate myself more. Depression is a thief that takes everything you have and then comes back in the middle of the night and nicks your sleep. I hate it. At the moment I don’t hate is as much as I hate myself, that just isn’t possible. But I will hate it fanatically eventually, and then I will begin to feel something other than whatever this is.

I will be OK. I just had to confess.

I don’t generally hold with cosmetic surgery. Those of you who read this blog on a regular basis will know that. Those of you who scream in terror every time you see some, often beloved, famous TV or film star of yesteryear, after bad plastic surgery will agree with me. Far too often, it ain’t pretty.

But we all have our Achilles Heel and mine is cosmetic dentistry. By that I don’t mean having my teeth whitened so that they glow in the dark or even having front teeth faced with pretty, bright white veneers. Quite honestly as long as my teeth are neither brown nor black, I really couldn’t give a damn. What I do care about however, is actually having teeth in my head. Tooth extraction makes your jawbone sag and can cause your face to look sunken and gaunt. It’s not a good look and it certainly isn’t one that I want to encourage in myself. And so, when I had to lose three back teeth, all on the top right hand side of my mouth, I knew I’d have to do something.

Nice people with only good intentions suggested a partial denture. Because teeth are my Achilles Heel, I suggested that they might like to consider decapitation as a viable solution to their self-esteem issues. I’m not very nice when it comes to my teeth. And, although far from vain about any other aspect of my appearance – who CAN be vain about having one eye higher than the other a la Liza Minelli – teeth are and remain the exception. Therefore in an act of utter, supreme selfishness, I opted to have a dental implant. These are ‘false teeth’ that actually screw into your jaw, which they support, and which are favoured by people like Ozzie Osborne, Keith Richard, Martin Amis and other luminaries too rich and famous to mention. Mid-list crime writers don’t usually have them, not unless they sell their jewellery or offer their souls to the devil. But guess what…

So last Wednesday I took 10 milligrams of the tranquilliser, Diazepam, got into the dentists chair, had numerous local anaesthetic injections administered into my mouth and had a big hole drilled into my jawbone. I then had the implant hammered into my head – luckily the Diazepam caused me not to care too much – and then I went home clutching one bottle of antibiotics and one bottle of painkillers. It’s still sore and bruised but the swelling has gone down and, although the one false tooth that I can afford to have implanted is not yet in place, the groundwork has been done. My dentist, who is a total gentle genius, is pleased and so far, the prognosis looks good.

So, an act of total unnecessary selfishness or a psychological necessity for a middle aged woman who feels a bit like an old, splintered, bind-weed encrusted shed? In a sense I’m only just hauling the old guttering back into place for a bit. But then I have spent a lot of money on myself and so, knowing my character as I do, I realise that penance will have to be done for this. Whether that will be living on a diet of bran based cereals (yikes!) for the next month or saving cash by acting dead for six weeks (laying on your bed just breathing is very cheap) I don’t know. But something will have to be done.

That said, the people I admire the most, just don’t care. Seventy eight year old actor Peter O’Toole was quoted as saying this week: ‘I can’t stand light. My idea of heaven is moving from one smoke-filled room to another. The only exercise I take is walking behind the coffins of friends who took exercise.’ Ah, Peter! Once one of the most handsome men in the world. He just threw it all away and is now an absolute legend because of it. But then he is a man which is, maybe, the nub of the issue. Would I, and others, applaud Peter if he was a woman? The sad fact is that we probably wouldn’t. We’d probably call him a sad old bag who has let herself go.

It looks like it’s on with the most expensive shed-repair in the world for me. So get the bran cereal out, mother, and I’ll take to me bed for a bit!

Yes, what the hell IS it about tunnels? Why am I fascinated by them and why am I not just simply a lone weirdo but probably one of millions?

I had to do a lot of travelling around the UK this week. Books don’t sell themselves and so I was out and about pressing the flesh and spreading the word. One of these jaunts was of course, back home to London. So, as ever, I jumped off the train at Kings Cross and headed as quickly as I could for the Tube (underground). I only had to wait a few minutes for my train but in that time I did what I always do which is walk determinedly towards the end of the platform. I HAVE to peer into the tunnel. I don’t know why. I’ve been doing it since I was a child and I will probably continue to do it until the day I die.

Sometimes it is just curiosity and sometimes I feel there’s more to it – an almost overwhelming compulsion to step off the platform and enter the black maw beyond. I’ve said for years that my ideal job would be that of a tube cleaner, one of an army of dedicated and fearless people who clean the lines and the tunnels in the wee, wee hours of the morning. As an ambition, it is strange, but then people are never what you think and I am no exception. I’ve mentioned before my involvement with the Old London Underground Company, which plans to open up the many, many disused stations in the capital. The day that comes to fruition, will be a day of deep joy for me, I can tell you.

But my subterranean interests do not stop at the Tube. Tunnels and vaults of all kinds are loved and cherished and, when I finally arrived at my friend Sarah’s house in Hackney, she had a lovely surprise for me.

‘You’ve got to see the Mole Man’s house,’ she said as I went to sit down and vegetate in front of the TV after my journey down from Manchester. ‘You’re not here for long. Come on!’

A Mole Man implied digging and possibly tunnels and so I didn’t need asking twice. We hopped into Sarah’s van and drove off down to a part of Hackney called De Beauvoir. We pulled up outside a huge, four-storey detached house that was covered in scaffolding. This, apparently, had been the home of a man called William Lyttle who, until the local council forced him to move out in 2009, had spent his time digging a vast network of tunnels underneath the property. These even extended out underneath the street and so the local authority were obliged, eventually, to evict Mr Lyttle in order to avoid the risk of subsidence. Sadly. Poor Mr Lyttle, the Mole Man, was moved to a flat on a local estate where earlier this year, at the age of 79, he died alone. His body was not, apparently discovered for weeks. What also remained and remains a mystery is why he dug his tunnels underneath his house.

As well as being a tunneler, William Lyttle was also a hoarder and his old house in De Beauvoir was packed with old fridges, cookers and cupboards, four complete, and rusting, Renault 4 cars and even a beaten up old boat. What was he up to? Well, in part he was probably, like me, a person fascinated by the subterranean. I have a cellar which, in spite of being the source of my leg breakage earlier this year, is also still an object of fascination to me. I wonder all the time what might lie underneath my cellar. William Lyttle just simply put into practice what remains in my head a mere desire. For this he was called eccentric and, because it was believed that his tunnelling was dangerous, he was moved out of the house that he owned and forced to live a probably very sad existence in a flat. I’ve no doubt that the council meant well and that some sort of subsidence had been detected, but I do really hate the seemingly relentless pursuit of visionaries and ‘eccentrics’ that goes on almost everywhere these days. Conformity is not just required, it is demanded and the homogeneity of humanity continues apace supported by rules governing everything from home contents to nose picking. I expect the day will eventually come when I will no longer be able to peer into tunnels because there’ll be some sort of weird safety barrier in the way.

But one must, in spite of all this, travel hopefully I think, as I survey my office which is piled to its very high ceiling with books, papers and what I would call ‘ephemera’ (others would dub it old shite, but there). William Lyttle might, sadly, be dead, but the tunnelers, hoarders, visionaries and dreamers remain. They are the ones that will be remembered in the future and ultimately, they are the ones that will leave all of us the most enduring images, the most mysterious and incandescent joy.

We are very lucky here in the UK. We have free health-care that, over the course of a life, will save a typical individual thousands and thousands of pounds. That said, a kind of price is exacted in the form of time. Even as a small child I recall endless hours of boredom dripping by as I waited sitting on chairs as hard as lead to see lofty and distant consultants in hospitals all over east London. Not much has changed in that respect over the years and yesterday, when I went to see my gynaecologist, I first had to spend an hour and a half in a semi-comatose state waiting my turn in the treatment room. Just like all the other zillions of people in the waiting room, I too thumbed many copies of lurid celebrity magazines and then stood by the window with an expression of hopelessness on my face. But for free healthcare, so be it. If of course, our new government allow us to have free healthcare. For the squazillionth time, to my knowledge, the National Health Service (NHS) is going to be ‘reformed’. What this actually means, none of us, as yet, know. But with the country in dire financial straits, it could mean anything including some sort of payment structure and so everyone is very, very nervous. Healthcare is expensive.

But help is at hand and it comes in the form of a book I am planning to write entitled Uterine Removal on the Number 104 Bus from Upton Park to Stratford. This is based partly upon the seminal 1973 How to Remove your appendix on the Circle Line from that wonderful, and scholarly, text the Brand New Monty Python Bok. A range of new self surgery text books is just what is needed for a world of uncertainty and when the average man and woman on the street is pretty skint. Obviously this and further texts, I am considering (Prostate Surgery on the Orient Express, 101 Plastic Surgery procedures in a plane) is only for those of a steady disposition, not to mention a steady hand. So how does Uterine Removal on the Number 104 bus from Upton Park to Stratford (URN104) work?

Well, first supplies will have to be got. This will include surgical instruments, swabs and bandages, sutures, antiseptics and analgesics. And although swabs, bandages and antiseptics may easily be purchased from any reputable pharmacy, the other items may be rather more difficult to find while the NHS is in its current state of flux. Strong analgesics, like morphine, are only available on prescription and are severely limited. It will therefore, be necessary to approach rather more unconventional suppliers like Mr Johnny ‘Fruitcake’ Leggs of Kilburn. Mr Leggs works out of a small office, or toilet, round the back of the ‘Spliff and Tampon’ pub in Greenford where he routinely dispenses morphine and other helpful analgesics from a suitcase marked ‘Biohazard’. Mr Leggs is also a useful contact when it comes to surgical instruments – or rather blades of varying sizes. His associate, a Mr Havoc of Somewhere Underneath the Hammersmith Flyover can, for a price, access anything from a simple razor blade right up to a full-sized guillotine. As for sutures – well, who hasn’t nicked a sewing kit from a hotel room at one time or another, eh?

Once equipped and hopefully, with enough morphine in your system to kill pain without losing consciousness, your bus ride to gynaecological health and cost effectiveness may begin. The aim is to make the first incision at Upton Park and, by the time Stratford Broadway hoves into view, to be in a position to dispose of the uterine material and any used sharps and unwanted sewing thread. Of course the needs and desires of other passengers will have to be taken into account as the operation proceeds and I would definitely recommend at least two buckets for those with weak stomachs, and four bottles of smelling salts at an absolute minimum. Ideally surgery should only be performed away from young children, pregnant women and people carrying heavy shopping. Some drivers do like to be informed that surgery is about to occur but most don’t. Amazingly some drivers report that on-bus surgery actually affects their driving in a very negative fashion. Staggering, but true.

All this is very practical, as I trust you will agree offering, as it does, a way forward towards health for a population possibly facing crippling surgical bills. The only other thing that may help is of course if our legions of beloved celebrities were to donate one of their plastic surgical procedures to a member of the public on an annual basis. For instance one liposuction procedure may be swapped for the setting of a broken arm. Both practical and philanthropic and will undoubtedly lead to the celebrity in question being loved and adored all the more. Everybody wins.

Note to self: I really must stop spending long periods of time in waiting rooms.

Cameras are such easy, everyday things to have now. I was out in central London earlier this week with mine, taking shots for a book I plan to write set in Soho in the 1970s. Wandering around taking pictures of chi-chi restaurants and self consciously bo-ho little shops, I suddenly felt really quite sad that I hadn’t taken any photos back in the 1970s. In those days the place was very different. Then it was awash with sex shops, brothels, strip clubs and peep-shows as well as the numerous characters that wandered the streets and sat in the bars. I remember them all, even if I don’t have so much as one photograph of any of them. When recreating the long, hot summer of 1976, I will have to rely on my memory, my friends memories and the historical records that I have accrued about that place and time.

I was a teenage drama student then and, together with my fellow ‘thespians’, we all used to hang out in Soho and its environs being ‘artistic’ and indulging in a lot of underage drinking. Our favourite pub was actually The Salisbury on St Martin’s Lane. Even now a hymn to over-wrought Victoriana, the Salisbury back then was a pub where gay men could be themselves and where the women and girls who frequently accompanied them could have a drink without being hit-on or pawed. I was one of their number and can recall many wild nights of too much alcohol, a lot of feather boas and a great deal of laughter in the Salisbury. One very strange night, a friend of mine went home with a ballet dancer who turned out to be a bathroom wrecking maniac. I was briefly pursued by a huge middle-eastern pimp who ran a whole rack of rent-boys in Piccadilly. I can’t remember how either of us survived – but we did.

It’s odd now to think that places like sex shops and porno cinemas were our playgrounds then. Whether we didn’t know or care to think about the exploitation and corruption behind such places, I really can’t say now. But I can still remember hanging on for dear life to my friend Johnston as a sex shop owner with a very bad wig on his head inflated his entire range of rubber sex dolls for an octogenarian with no teeth. We both left, running and crying with laughter. We’d go to films with titles like Naughty Little Vixens just to watch all the old men run in and out of the toilets the whole time. Again, we’d do so for a laugh. I couldn’t tell you what any of the films were about then and I still can’t now. We’d usually top an evening of such activity off with a plate of pasta in some little Italian restaurant where the food would be so plentiful, four of us would share one portion. Then, likely as not, we’d all walk home. None of us had any money and with terror alerts (the IRA back then) on the tube every other day people were not so keen to travel on the underground. It was a time of fear and anxiety for grown-ups like my parents who were worried for their jobs and sometimes, given the bombing situation, for their lives as well.

But for kids, it was a fun time even if the environment in which we lived was shabby and sometimes threatening. People often talk about the recent past, particularly the seventies, as a time of monochrome hues, a place of black and shades of grey. My own recollections are much more colourful and I do really wish I’d had a camera then to capture at least some of it. But then maybe I don’t. The interior of the old Salisbury that I see when I close my eyes is, I know, so much better than any photograph.

Perpetrators in my books don’t tend to go in for killing sprees. I guess I have always found the somewhat theatrical and florid aspects of these events rather more distressing than actually interesting. More often than not, these things pursue a familiar course which is driven by a known type of offender. Basically a man with a raft of problems and grudges, both real and assumed, goes apparently berserk with a gun or a knife and then kills himself. With luck, only a few people are killed or injured. Sadly that is not always the way and certainly in the case of 52 year old Derrick Bird who killed 12 people in Cumbria last month, a lot of people directly and indirectly, suffered. And although we all now know that Derrick Bird was under financial pressure as well as dealing with rejection from his young Thai girlfriend when he committed his crimes, none of his personal issues excuse what he did.

Now, also in the north of England, but this time in the east of the country, we have Raoul Moat. He was only released from Durham jail last week. But as soon as he could, he got himself a gun, shot his ex-girlfriend and her new partner and then shot a policeman. Luckily the policeman and the ex-girlfriend have managed to survive, but her partner is dead and Moat is still at large in a county, Northumbria, that is England’s answer to the Tora Bora Mountains of Afghanistan. It could take months to find him, time during which he could and is indeed starting to, achieve mythic status.

I don’t know whether what Derrick Bird did in Cumbria back in June acted as a catalyst or spur to Raoul’s Moat’s actions. But, just like Bird, he is a man scorned and in his communications to the police, he blames his ex-girlfriend for what he has done saying that her infidelity drove him to it. Apparently quite a lot of other men who have now posted onto Moat’s Facebook site agree with this assessment of the situation and reckon that a woman almost shot to death, her current partner murdered, ‘had it coming’. Others apparently applaud his targeting of the police, an organisation Moat blames for much that is wrong with his life. How these people will feel now that Moat has apparently stated that anyone is now fair game, I don’t know. He has said that he won’t stop until he is killed and wants to go down in what I imagine he thinks will be a blaze of glory. These things nearly always seem to have an element of the ‘wild west’ about them. Maybe we should consider banning Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid? (Not)

But putting the sickening misogyny and the grandstanding aside, both Bird and Moat and their admirers have entirely lost sight of just how un-mythic and tawdry this is. Spree killers are people who blame others. They go on the rampage because it’s a way of attracting attention that even now in our ‘reality’ obsessed culture gets you more air time than Victoria and David Beckham combined. Even their deaths are acts of cinematic bathos as they either fall dead to the floor in a hail of police bullets or pull the trigger on themselves. That people are so damaged they feel they have to resort to such tactics is tragic, but to perpetuate the myth of spree killing is unforgivable.

Whether Bird inspired Moat may never be known, particularly if Moat dies in the way that he wants to. But I think that, even if I didn’t realise it before, I now know why I don’t have spree killers in my books. It’s because, though truly sorry for any pain these men might have experienced in their lives, I just cannot deal with the level of narcissism involved. It doesn’t engage me. People who feel that they have nothing to live for, often try and/or succeed at suicide. That is tragic and in my practice as a Mental Health Advocate, I always tried my best to make sure that no one I worked with felt they had to do that. But to ‘take’, as it were, other people with you? No, even in fiction I can’t give that the oxygen of publicity. Like most people, thankfully, in the UK at the moment, I just want this incident to come to an end without any more further bloodshed, hysteria or heroic grandstanding.

As those of you who read my ramblings from time to time will probably have deduced, I am not the sort of person who does ‘social networking’. Friends Reunited didn’t appeal, Facebook looked even more alarming and Twitter I think, may well be the First Circle of Hell. Too disordered to ‘network’, on another level I am probably far too un-weird to engage in these pursuits.

I don’t get why anyone would want to tell thousands of strangers about their eating habits or the music they are into. I am extremely fortunate in that I have a lot of very good mates as well as many charming colleagues with whom I can talk about such things, face to face, by phone or by e-mail if I want to. Why do I want to tell a complete stranger who suddenly and, to me, unaccountably wants to be my friend? And then there’s the privacy thing.

Maybe it’s years of working in psychiatric institutions that’s made me like this, but I am very jealous of my privacy. When you work in such places, disclosure is actively discouraged. Barbara Nadel the author is, in a sense, a public entity, but she is not actually me – or rather she is only part of who I am. When not being her, I sod about and do all sorts of stuff that she wouldn’t even dream about doing. Some of it is quite weird, much of it is banal beyond belief. Why anyone would want me to ‘tweet’ about sewing up a hole in my tee-shirt, cleaning the toilet or staring into the abyss of my own depression is a mystery. To me it seems like an extension of the Big Brother reality TV programme we have here in the UK. This is where a group of very troubled people are incarcerated in a house for months on end and watched every minute of the day by TV cameras, which broadcast their every nose-pick to the nation. At the end of this process the one deemed the least objectionable is declared the ‘winner’ and given a pile of cash, while the rest of the ‘housemates’ generally go on to fame and fortune on cable TV or enter rehab. God knows I could do with the £100,000 prize money, but even with that incentive I know I’d really rather nail my own car to a speeding train. Too intrusive!

But I am only human and too intrusive does not mean that all of this is not horribly fascinating. Not very often and only under strict conditions of abject boredom, I do sneak the odd look at those Facebook pages that the uninitiated are allowed to see. God help me, but I do sometimes Google the name of someone I knew a thousand years ago and look to see what they admit to liking, loving and doing. I know it’s ghastly and voyeuristic and I would HATE it if anyone ever did that to me. In the spirit of confidentiality I won’t tell you who any of them are and so my cruel hilarity at the things they either a) really like, or b) pretend to like, are secrets I will take to the grave. I will even take revenge upon myself for my nasty little habit on their behalf. So below, please find a faux Facebook list of things that Barbara Nadel may or may not like, depending of course, upon whether she is telling the truth or just wants to impress and amaze you and/or lead you to believe that she is actually only 19.

Movies

Nine and a Half Weeks
The Birds
Grey Gardens
Transformers
The October Man

TV

The Wire
Hannah Montana
Mock the Week
Dickinson’s Real Deal
The Addams Family

Music

Pink Martini
Sisters of Mercy
The Snivelling Shits
Lady Ga Ga
Cliff Richard
Arabesk
REM

Other/Activities

Booze
Fags
Walking on the moors in the rain
Books
Derelict buildings
İstanbul
London
High anxiety
Beansprouts
Staring into the abyss of my own depression

So there you have it. Now I DO exist. Sort of.