‘Why are you standing at the foot of my bed holding a sledgehammer?’ he asked. It was a fair question considering not an hour before we’d been eating squid and drinking cold Leo on the veranda together. What had bought me to this point of madness? To the accompaniment of concert harps played by lithe middle-aged women in knitted cardigans I flashed back two weeks hence to a day when the sky was still azure and the bougainvilleas were bleating forth their gaudy colours. The email rose majestically on the screen like a second sunrise.

‘I represent a major newspaper with a readership of 11.2 billion and I’d like to drive down to Pak Nam Lang Suan to do a feature on you.’

‘Man, these Nigerians,’ I thought. ‘They stop at nothing. Not satisfied with robbing desperate widows of their life savings, now they claim to be journalists. ‘Mbagwe,’ I wrote back, ‘I’m not falling for that one, son. Go take a running jump off a tall giraffe.’ But, after several security checks which included me speaking to the journalist’s mother in New York, it turned out Mgamwe was legit.

‘So, do I come down or not?’ he asked.

‘You paying for the petrol?’

‘Jesus! I could always do John Burdett, you know?’

‘Okay. Don’t get shirty. Yeah, you can come.’

‘Gee, thanks.’

We haven’t got a spare room so I booked him and his personal assistant into the Salt Water View Short Term Beachfront motel just down the coast. I’d never actually seen anyone stay there overnight but you never know if a tour bus is going to break down out front on the very night you’ve got VIP guests. It occurred to me that if all this wasn’t a scam, it was a pretty cool thing so I started to phone around.

‘This big newspaper’s doing a feature on me, with photos. Using my actual name.’

I called all my friends and living relatives, then a couple of dead ones. One call was to Bobby Bristol. Now, Bobby’s a nice chap but it’s rumoured they based Mel Gibson’s role in Conspiracy Theory on Bobby’s actual life.

‘Why?’ he asked.

‘Why what?’

‘Why you?’

‘I guess they want to know about my books and understand the man behind the stories.’

‘Oh, come on, CC. Be real. No offense intended here but do you honestly think a serious newspaper’s gonna be interested in your dumb books?’

He’d said, “No offense intended,” but that did little to alleviate the offensiveness.

‘Yes?’

‘CC, CC, sometimes I can’t believe how naïve you can be. They’re not interested in you as a writer. They’ve got other agendas. They’ve got something deeper in mind.’

‘I haven’t got anything deeper.’

‘I know that and you know that, but that’s not gonna stop them. Oh no. These investigative journalists, they’ll find it even if it isn’t there. They’ll dig up dirt on you and plaster it all over the front page. Bye bye reputation. Nobody’ll ever buy one of your books again. Dead.’

I had a week to let all this ferment. There were omens. It rained every day. Two of the dogs got diarrhea. My favourite hibiscus died. Then they arrived in a big black car like the politburo. They were friendly and funny like serial killers. They asked a lot of questions like the IRS. They didn’t complain about the Salt Water short term like people who knew they wouldn’t have to fill in the guest register. Like people who could be in and out with nobody knowing who they really were. He matched me drink for drink and those sinister questions just kept popping out of him. By the seventh beer I knew Bobby Bristol was right. I couldn’t possibly let these people go home.

And so we come to him asking me why I was standing at the foot of his bed holding a sledgehammer. Luckily, it was then that I snapped out of my paranoia. He’s just doing his job. It’s been a slow news week. Let him live.

‘Cockroach,’ I said and proceeded to smash the floor tiles to buggery.

‘Big one?’ he asked. (Another damned question)

‘Not really,’ I said. ‘But they’re tough little sods.’

‘Well, gee. Thanks.’

‘You’re welcome.’

I bade him sweet dreams and returned to my room and thought, ‘Whew. That was a near thing’. Before everybody in the world started saying it, my Auntie Rene used to tell me that if something seemed too good to be true, it probably was. Except Auntie Rene had a trick ending. Her version went, If something seems too good to be true, it probably is…unless it isn’t.

I want to write about sex and about death. Since writing was invented it is hard to think of a writer who didn’t embrace these two states of the human condition. They jockey throughout life like two racecars fighting for pole position, and we go along for the ride, strapped into the passenger’s seat of both cars, pretending that we are at the wheel. We avoid thinking that sooner or later we are going to crash both cars. Our brains program us to believe that we are Formula A professional drivers. That individually our skill shapes, alters and controls our destiny. It’s a simple delusion that sitting in the back is the same as being at the wheel but it does pull us through the day (and night).

That’s the reality of life. Your two cars are going over the cliff and into the void. Sex is the one that usually stalls out and sputters to a stop first. Old age sputters, too, and sometimes needs a little push before gravity takes over. And if you look in the rearview mirror, you’ll see a long line of cars right on your bumper about to follow you into the void.

Why the gloom, Moore? What Celtic genes are switching through your synapses that sends a chemical bath through your neuron system and comes out the other end as the ritual of a shotgun marriage between sex and death and a James Dean finality to all of it?

Sir Frank Kermode

It started with Sir Frank Kermode died on Wednesday in Cambridge at the age of 90. He’d written over 50 books. He’d been knighted. He was a Shakespeare scholar, too. Sir Frank wasn’t a relative, a mentor, a friend or even someone I’d recognize passing him on the street. His drive over the cliff of life has been noted in the literary blogs, that faint cluster of stars in the far reaches of the visible Net universe.

Sir Frank with 90 innings at the plate and 50 home runs is inducted into the Pantheon of those few who are nominated by the living as having accomplished a good life, left behind a body of work with his name attached, and contributed to our knowledge and understanding about literature. I think of Sir Frank as someone who represented the high road, what we call ‘high culture.’ He is scheduled to go from life to myth and legend. That apparently is the best we can hope for when the nose of our car points due south and into the void.

So far I suspect a number of readers have been skimming this article impatiently wanting to know when do we get to Sex. That’s the leveler, the Pantheon of beings that gets our engines going. Either you do it, read or watch others doing it, talk about doing it, buy medicine that promises doing-it performance, shop for doing-it accessories, think or day dream about doing it, or have dreams in which you definitely out distancing Robocop in the doing-it department.

Shigeo Tokuda

This brings me back to Sir Frank. We don’t think about old people having sex. Dying, yes. That’s what they’re supposed to do, get out of the way, make way for the young horny ones in our midst. Let’s take a short drive down the low road. Our driver is Shigeo Tokuda, who started his porno film career at 60-years old, and fifteen years later, hitting the 75-year mark, has 200 films under his belt (so to speak). Mr. Tokuda (no knighthood on the horizontal bamboo mat in his future) claims no need to swallow a Viagra before the cameras roll. His position (he assumes many in his films) is that getting and maintaining an impressive erection is purely psychological. Most of Mr. Tokuda’s co-stars are females who are around 30-years old. There is a whole genre of porno films labeled ‘elderporn’ where the age difference between the elderly male and his counterpart is best measured in light years. There is also a sub-genre of elderly women having sex with young men but apparently the market for such films is thin.

When Shigeo Tokuda follows Sir Frank over that cliff for his final take, he may not be remembered for his insights into Shakespeare but for his starring roles in such classics as Tit-Lover Old Man Kameichi and His Horny Pranks.

High road or low road, like blue pill or red pill. You have a choice in the road you take. Authors make that choice every time they start a book. Writing blends death and sex into myth, folktale, legend and serving up a strong brew turns us into addicts. We drink down to the last dregs such stories and ask for a refill. The reality is Sir Frank’s opus makes believe that lives devoted to the pursuit of knowledge and wisdom are the pinnacle of human existence and shows our true potential for opening our minds. But our dirty little secret is that we’d trade places playing Shigeo Tokuda’s understudy in our old age rather than parsing the meaning of Hamlet into a book-sized essay. In our heart of hearts, something tells us that while we can never aspire to the likes of Sir Frank, we have a fighting chance to follow Shigeo Tokuda’s example to the final moment when the lights are cut and the stage goes dark.

I could leave Sir Frank and Shigeo at this point. But that would do both of them a disservice. There is something not quite right in the mash up of two very different lives that should stop us from snickering into our hand. This is where SLIM comes into the picture.

The SLIM, which is short-hand for Small, Limited and Impermanent, describes the outer ring dimensions of a single human life. It doesn’t matter whether you’re aiming to be Sir Frank or Mr. Shigeo, SLIM is what all of us are stuck with, including you. We have a sense in a celebrity driven world that some lives appear to be inflated, expanded beyond the normal, and indeed in a real sense these lives give the impression of a SLIM violation.

But there can be no such violation. The human condition is the same for everyone. No one is an exception—no one is immune to SLIM as it is the fundamental rule of defines our existence.

There is another point about the high and low roads. The guardrails and yellow line down the center are come from morality, laws and ethics. We are taught from an early age to follow these rules of the road. But we love our outlaws and our porno stories nonetheless.

The best writers sculpture stories populated with characters who promise to have found a trap door and chance of escape from SLIM. In reality fiction, such a conceit usually is the characters undoing. In fantasy and science fiction, the elements are bent, twisted, and the way out is something that looks vaguely like the human condition but is post-SLIM, like the promise of post-human singularity life. The digital world promises a kind of abstract immortality that is impossible in our analog biology. In the digital universe you are converted into a kind of ‘fingerprint’ in a book where we keep track of whose existences are worthy of remembrance.

Books and films and music—the arts—offer readers a chance to transcend their human condition, sweep aside the SLIM, and substitute a human condition that is much larger, borderless and permanent. The journey to find such alternatives is our tragedy. Noir is the world where the characters never will stand a chance at such transcendence, a world where all the guardrails and center lines are an illusion, the headlights are switched off, and the character drive blind. In the noir world, at each step, the reader understands the utter futility of fighting SLIM. Shigeo Tokuda will one day need to pop a Viagra, and later on the day will come when even Viagra won’t do the trick. Laughter will rain down from the rest of us when that happens, as we secretly believe that unlike Shigeo we will be spared this humiliation as our young co-star lights a cigarette, wraps the sheet around her and winks into the camera.

50 books, 90-years old is an accomplishment; make no mistake about that. Sir Frank gave us our best shot at blowing a hole through SLIM. Bigger caliber rounds have bounced off the shell of SLIM before, and bigger rounds will be loaded and fired in the future. Why do we continue to believe the impossible can be achieved in a single life?

Because so much of life is in working out the daily stuff of existence, Sir Frank working over a draft of a book, Shigeo driving to the studio, brushing teeth, eating, checking email, taking a phone call, reading a newspaper, gossiping with a friend, helping out someone in the family or a neighbor. It doesn’t add up to much. It lacks weight and importance. It is so incredibly impermanent. We crave a life that tips the scales as having been heavy and strong and long.

As writers we undertake the tasks of finding the location of such weight and meaning among the rubble of day-to-day existence and attached these dispatches which makes life grander, more exciting, and purposeful. Unless you write noir which puts your nose into SLIM and asks you as the reader to keep on breathing.

Like bends in the road, a story—noir or otherwise—demarks a path, and characters need a good reason to go down that path, equipped with the skills to negotiate the twists and turns, and dealing with the troubles along the way. The destination is, as they say, not the reason to travel; it is the journey and what happens along the way that defines us.

Writing of the disdain expressed for genre novels by critics, Raymond Chandler said that there were just as many bad “literary novels” of the type favored by critics as there were bad genre stories – except that the bad literary novels didn’t get published. In other words, there’s nothing inherent in so-called genre fiction that makes it lesser than “literary” fiction.

Chandler knew what he was talking about. His great noir novels, such as “The Big Sleep” and “The Long Goodbye,” are must-reads for anyone who wants to know how to build a sentence and a voice, how to create an image that won’t fade a few pages on, how to make people want to read it all over again. His contemporaries in the “literary” field who were more favored by the highbrow critics of his time are these days consigned to the dustbin of college literature courses. (If you don’t believe me, tell me when was the last time you reached for a volume by Upton Sinclair or Pearl Buck?)

But historical fiction is back. Ever since “The Name of the Rose” (published in English in 1983), the genre has accrued greater legitimacy. Last year’s Booker Prize went to a historical novel (“Wolf Hall”) and this year’s looks likely to go to “The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet” (do an internet search for its author David Mitchell and “genius,” and you’ll see why.)

Even poor old Alexandre Dumas and the swashbuckler have been returned from their long-ago burial under a mound of critical invective. In the last decade or so, Dumas has found his way into the title of a novel by Arturo Perez-Reverte, one of the most notable historical novelists of our time. Perez-Reverte can buckle a swash in the form of his Dumas-derived Captain Alatriste series, but he also has enough modern perversity for one of his novels to have been adapted for the screen by Roman Polanski. (That novel, “The Club Dumas,” even included a reference to Eco, “the professor from Bologna,” in a nod to his role in legitimizing the genre.)

Crime readers who want something with a bit of a cosmopolitan, intellectual slant often go for the World War II-period mysteries of Alan Furst. There have been other successful evocations of old Vienna in the books of J. Sydney Jones, and likewise for New York with Caleb Carr. My blogmate Barbara Nadel alternates between contemporary Turkey and historical London to great effect.

Each of these books, in their way, does what historical fiction alone can do. They take contemporary issues, place them in a historical context and thus let us see them anew. One of the best novels of the last two decades was Barry Unsworth’s heartbreaking evocation of the slave trade in “Sacred Hunger.” You’ll never see race and class the same way once you’ve read that book.

That’s partially why I’ve turned to historical fiction for the books I’m working on right now. Earlier this year my fourth Palestinian crime novel came out. Before I return to my West Bank sleuth Omar Yussef, I’m going historical.

My New York editor is working on MOZART’S LAST ARIA now. It’ll be out in the UK in late winter, in the US in early fall. I’m writing a novel now about the last years of Caravaggio’s life. Both take a real historical mystery as their starting point. But I also think they’ll tell us a great deal about what it is to live the life of an artist, and more than that they’ll focus on the nature of love. That’s something that isn’t limited to any historical period.

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 was at my lowest ebb. The book I thought I was writing suddenly started to write me and I had no control over it. I was suicidal. All those Shakespeare impersonators had it right. They used a quill. If the writing didn’t work out you just span it round and impaled yourself on it. But how do you even begin to kill yourself with a keyboard? I tried smashing myself over the head with it but all I got was a headache and ‘qwerty’ engraved down my forehead. Where would my next idea come from? Where could I go for inspiration? And, as always, the answer was, Laos.

The Director General of the Ministry of Information and Culture’s Publishing Department, who shall remain nameless because it’s got more letters in it than Paris Hilton’s mail box, gave an inspirational talk on the occasion of Lao Printing Day. I usually send a card but this year I’ve been a little tangled up with a bloody book that wouldn’t let me write it. The director general should know how to get us stuck writers over the hump because he’s written over fifty poems some of which became songs. (I imagine any poem could become a song if you sang it.) His key points were;

1. “Reading is one of the many ways in which we can improve our knowledge, but books containing useless information are a waste of readers’ time.”

There you go. Right off the bat he got the nib square in the solar plexus. The DG was talking about me. He was killing me softly with his song which had originally been a poem. I wasn’t writing anything to improve anyone’s knowledge. I WAS MAKING IT UP. Nobody could trust me. I wrote it down. ‘write knowledge.’

2. “In addition, they (writers) should be clear on their own standpoint and national policy when they write a book.”

Oh my word. Got me again. Where was my standpoint? I tell you, it was in the ideology toilet. MAKE ENOUGH MONEY FROM THIS BOOK TO PAY FOR DOG FOOD. I didn’t have a point, either erect or reclining. And I hadn’t even considered my national policy. I wasn’t even sure where my nation was. I wrote, ‘write to conservative party.’

3. “One way to support the Party’s strategy on national development and economic policy is to write more human interest pieces, especially profiles of successful businesspeople, which would act as an example for others to follow.”

Exactly. Where has my head been all this time? The public doesn’t want to read about losers. People who spend all their time reading novels are already losers. THEY WANT TO READ ABOUT STINKING RICH PEOPLE. It’s just like all those country people addicted to TV soaps about hi-so philanderers in Bangkok. I wrote, ‘forget everything the Lao communist Party used to believe in. It’s so passé.’

4. “A good book should make readers laugh or cry while they are reading it.”

There you have it in a nutshell. It’s the readers who are supposed to be crying. Not me. The only time I ever got sobs out of my readers was when they reached the end of a book and referred back to the price they’d paid for it. I discovered that in 1968, the DG had written a book entitled, It’s Very Easy to Learn the Lao Language. And I bet you generations of readers have been laughing and crying through it ever since. But DG’s point here is quite simple. Don’t take it personally. IT’S THE STORY THEY’RE LAUGHING AT, NOT THE AUTHOR. I wrote, ‘Stick in a few jokes.’

I thought I had all the inspiration I needed, but the greatest uplift to my saggy self-esteem goolies was yet to come. And it arrived, not from the Ministry of Information and Culture, but from the Ministry of Education. Somebody had decided that Lao university graduates compared unfavourably with those from neighbouring countries. So, what did they do? THEY CANCELLED UNIVERSITY ENTRANCE. Really. All the kids who’d forked out for a corsage for this year will have to put it back in the freezer cause they all have to do another year of high school. That’ll teach ‘em. And, you know? It taught me the best lesson of all.

IF IT DOESN’T GO RIGHT – START ALL OVER AGAIN.

If you’re on the flight from Bangkok to Surat around now and you look down and see a rather large bonfire, fear not. That’s just my first draft. Kop jai, Lao.

Last Sunday morning I stumbled half awake (my usual early morning fog) from the bedroom of the condo into the kitchen. I had orange juice on my mind. Normally the kitchen is empty at 8.00 a.m. On this Sunday, though, the counters and floor were piled with plastic bags from Klong Toey market, fruit and vegetables spilling out onto the counters. My wife was talking to our Burmese maid. On the floor was a plastic basket and inside the basket was a duck.

A white duck with its feet tied. It looked at me, I looked at it, then at my wife and finally the maid. “How did a duck get past security?”

“The guards just laughed,” said the maid.

I wasn’t exactly laughing. “Let me get this straight, we have a live duck in a building in which all pets are prohibited except gold fish. The duck wasn’t going to cut it as a fish.”

“It’s for Pattaya,” said my wife, as if I were far too slow off the mark.

“Our duck needs a wife,” said the maid.

I started to understand this was one of those Saturday morning conspiracies. The women had taken in their minds that a bachelor duck had to be miserable and the way to fix his life was to buy him a bride.

You need some background about the groom—the male duck who was about to have a blind date with the white duck in my kitchen.

We have cobbled together some buildings on a plot of land near Pattaya. There is a small pond on the land. And in that small pond is a duck. A solitary male duck that I had assumed was a mallard. A wild duck that had found a sanctuary away from the maddening crowd.

“That duck is a wild duck. He’ll have nothing to do with this duck from the market,” I told the women.

Later that morning, we set off for Pattaya with the duck in the backseat. I had gone back to the condo unit for a book, the wife and duck were already downstairs in the car. As I got out of the lift, I saw the signs of duck vomit, duck shit, and duck food, and this wasn’t difficult, as the maid and wife had left a nicely defined trail of feathers, food, and poop that led from the lift to the condo door. The whole floor smelled foul. I held my breath. The damp duck smell seemed to seep through my pores.

You can only hold your breath for so long. I found that when I got in the car and saw the duck looking at me from the backseat—this time she had her wings tied too, to prevent hazard of duck flight I suspected. That bad smell filled the interior of the car. My wife who is usually the first line of defense in the bad smell department was suspiciously quiet. It would have been anti-duck to fuss about the odor. I braced myself for the hour and a half drive, mouth-breathing, as I clutched the steering wheel. It so happened that at the entrance to the elevated Expressway, two Thai police officers, wearing those cheap versions of surgical masks, pulled me over. He asked for my driver’s license, I unfastened my seat belt, found my wallet, and gave him the license.

“What’s the problem officer?”

“You’re not wearing your seatbelt.””

“Of course I am not wearing my seatbelt. I’ve stopped and you’ve asked to see my license. I needed to remove the seatbelt to get the license.”

He looked at my wife. “She wasn’t wearing a seatbelt.”

As we approached the tollbooth, my wife who faithfully wears her seatbelt had unfastened her seatbelt to check on the duck (bad timing). That made her a felon I guess. The cop kept looking at the duck. It crossed my mind that I could go down in history as the first crime fiction writer who used a duck to pay a bribe to a Thai cop. I was getting ready to hand the duck through the window, when he asked, “What do you two do?”

There are just so many ways I can answer that question. The one answer that is never used: “Well, sir, I am a writer of fiction.” That’s a good way to lose a duck. Instead I said, “I am a lawyer, sir. And I am on way to advice the chamber of commerce how to increase tourism in Thailand. Duck farming,” I said.

“And I am a consultant for the UN,” said my wife.

I glanced back at the duck as if she was obviously on an undercover humanitarian mission and had risked herself to check on the condition of white ducks.

That admission, fortunately carried the day, as no self-respecting cop is going to take a duck from the husband of a UN consultant and not get some blow back from the big flock of swans in Geneva. He waved us through. No money had changed hands. I saw the cop in my rearview mirror, his facemask protecting him against the worst of the duck smell and realized for the first time why they wore those masks.

On the rest of the drive, having just escaped arrest, possible forfeiture of the duck, and other outrages, the conversation between my wife and me was subdued. “The pond duck is not going to like the market duck. He might attack her. After all she’s going into his pond.”

“He’ll bond with our duck.”

A few minutes after we arrived at Eel Swamp, the name of the surrounding properties, which includes our little hovel, my wife took the white duck and released her in the pond. The brown duck was already in the water. I waited thinking this was going to get ugly, and white feathers would fly. I also thought Starbucks was insane to sell coffee for $3 when you could buy it on the street for 50 cents. I was wrong about Starbucks—which the Thais took to like a duck to water—and I was dead wrong about the brown duck in the pond.

First he wasn’t a mallard. He was also a market duck bought by the workers who had nailed together our hovel. He’d been left behind. Sooner of later one of the workers may sneak back to claim the brown duck for dinner. In the meantime, he swam straight up to the white female and did what so many single male tourists coming from outside of Thailand do—he surrendered. After a day, she had him swimming behind her. She took over the pond. Two days into the program, the once proud male duck, hides in the tall grass and rarely goes into the pond for a swim. He has that haunted look of man on the run, under torture, or married. She doesn’t let him out of her sight. As if she was scanning the sky for younger, slimmer Pattaya ducks, the female duck is no longer that docile tied up creature I saw in the kitchen on Sunday morning. She had a bold mission—keep her man in line of sight while hunting for something to eat. Females are good at multitasking.

By Wednesday most of the duck smell had evaporated from my car. The brown and white ducks seem like they’ve been a couple for years. It doesn’t matter that they just met. There wasn’t a lot of choice in their mating. And may be there is a lot less choice in our own mating. The lesson for me in all of this, should the police pull you over for a traffic violation, it doesn’t hurt to have a live duck on your backseat. Actually it helps matters. Even a hardened cop understands that a couple who love animals and nature should always be given a second chance.

Rock musicians like to note that, had they not discovered their talents for destroying ear-drums, they’d have been criminals. It adds some edge to their pampered personae. Here’s my claim to edge: had I not been a writer, I’d have been locked up long ago, but not in a jail. Or at least I’d be sedated.

I know this for sure, because when I’m between drafts of a novel I feel the old madnesses creeping up on me. The dark resentments whose origins I can’t quite nail down. The tension around the center of my chest and the heavy breathing and the tight jaw and the voice in my head telling me this isn’t fair, whatever it is. The flickering fantasies penetrating my mind when it lacks the focus that otherwise keeps it calm.

My wife sees all this before I do, at least consciously. “Maybe you ought to work on something else while you’re waiting to start a new draft,” she says, gentle and delicate, as if she were waiting for me to respond with an angry “I’m all right, dammit.”

I have to take a break, you see, because writing a novel requires for me at least 10 drafts. Read a book 10 times straight and see if you don’t get bored with it. Or really pissed off.

So when I get through a draft, I take a week or so before I get back into it. As the end of the draft approaches, I start to fret about that week. I can’t take an actual vacation, because I always tell myself that I don’t know precisely when I’ll reach the end of the draft and therefore I can’t book a trip in advance. I try to line up some reading related to the subject of the book, but sometimes the books turn out to be duds or I’m done with them in a day and a half.

This time, as I take a break between drafts of my novel about the Italian artist Caravaggio, I find myself sweating it out in the desert heat of Jerusalem. Enervating, indeed. I’m already a little fevered in any case, because I’ve been deep in the psyche of Caravaggio, who was both a brilliant artist and a duelist with an explosive temper.

In fact, when he wasn’t working, Caravaggio was liable to get into tavern brawls and raging arguments with everyone around him. That suggests I’m not alone in my frenetic between-drafts mental state. It’s a good job I can’t carry a rapier around Jerusalem.

I used to think that perhaps I just wasn’t that nice. My theory was that when I’m writing, or when I’m on a book tour talking about my books, I’m a very pleasant fellow, but take away the dope, as it were, of creative writing and I turn into the clenched up ball of resentments and violence that I used to be as a teenager.

I don’t think that any more. I’ve done enough meditation and other self-examinations (I won’t go into them here, but they’d all sound very new agey, I expect; never mind, they’ve been great for me) to know that the “real” me only emerges during periods when I’m working. My concentration at those times is deep. It’s as though I’m listening to my self, without judgment, just as one does in meditation.

When I’m not working, it’s harder to hear the voice of my self. I’m more likely to pick up other sounds, the psychological noise pollution that comes with minor confrontations on the road, annoying emails, vague slights from acquaintances.

So this time I’m writing a play about Gaza, before I go back to my Caravaggio novel. You might think Gaza isn’t a place to find peace, but I’ve always enjoyed a deep concentration whenever I’ve been there. To bring that concentration together with the tranquility of creativity ought to keep me sane until it’s time to get back to my novel.

Either that, or the next time I post to this blog it’ll be from a jail somewhere…

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!

If you enjoy novels with a political twist, here is a list of the best 50 novels for political junkies.

The top five are:

· Brave New World, Aldous Huxley: Aldous Huxley’s classic novel is set in a world where a global government limits procreation and forces its citizens into a cycle of endless economic consumption. A must-read for anyone interested in tales of the extent to which a body will go to control its subjects.

· 1984, George Orwell: Released in 1949, Orwell’s novel depicts a totalitarian society in which the government constantly revises historical records in order to appear blameless and correct. Chilling and ahead of its time.

· Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury: The controlling political system of Bradbury’s dystopia has outlawed reading and, by extension, free and critical thought. The novel revolves around the way people cede control of their lives to silent governing units.

· Blindness, Jose Saramago: Jose Saramago’s searing work won him the Nobel Prize for Literature. His novel deals with the citizens of an unnamed city as they succumb to a freak epidemic of global blindness. The splintered government quarantines more and more of the people as society devolves. A harrowing look at how oppressive systems exist on all levels.

· Seeing, Jose Saramago: The sequel to Blindness finds many of the same characters returning, this time for a more direct attack on corrupt politics. The populace casts blank ballots at an election to protest the government’s distance and detachment, spurring the government to greater heights of alienation and control.

Source: www.onlineuniversities.com

To understand hardships from the inside, you need to be patient. People who suffer either complain all the time or stay silent. In both cases, the nature of suffering is communicated. It is in the crucible of anguish that defines the person in later life. Withstanding adversity in the face of overwhelming odds is difficult as it is rare. But people do arise above their hardships and we call that ability to keep going a virtue.

Our eyes are wide open to our own injuries, despairs, and insults but we are often blind when others around us have the same inflicted on their lives. We walk passed the beggar. We don’t notice the blind lottery seller. Or the old man selling baked bananas wrapped in banana leaves.

We over estimated the importance and duration of our own humiliations and underestimate the feeling of someone who has been humiliated. Often someone without power or influence suffer in front of our notice if we care to look. A child. A grandmother. A beggar.

Or a motorcycle taxi driver.

I take a motorcycle taxi most days in Bangkok. It is inexpensive, convenient, and fast. Traffic jams are legendary in Bangkok. The motorcycle is the best weapon to use when all cars have come to a halt. They carefully thread their way through narrow corridors, avoiding rearview mirrors.

Most of the major intersections in my neighbourhood have a motorcycle taxi stand. From a handful of drivers to a couple of dozen, the motorcycle taxi system allows the drivers to make a subsistence living. Often they are taking local residents to fancy condos, hotels or restaurants. The rich stay hidden behind the tinted windows of their cars and SUVs and utility vans. They wouldn’t be caught dead on the back of a motorcycle taxi. They’d rather stay inside their vehicle no matter how bad the traffic. To take a motorcycle bike would assault their personal dignity.

I see foreigners and members of the Thai middle class using them. Their passengers are delivered to places of luxury, buildings that they have vague knowledge about from TV soapbox operas. These drivers are never from the inside.

There approximately 200,000 motorcycle taxi drivers in Bangkok. That is a city-sized group of people—driver are mostly men but include women, too. Most of the drivers come from the Northeast of Thai. They have a limited education and limited alternative employment. Many of the drivers, having saved up money travel back to the Northeast, helping parents and relatives with farming activities and contributing money and information about the big city.

A lot of their time is waiting their turn in the queue in the hot sun. At each taxi stand a rotation system is used so that all drivers have a fair chance at the work. The local fares are ten or twenty baht. Few people use them for distant travel. I used them to go one kilometer to the gym or two kilometers to lunch.

Each time I arrive in one piece, I feel grateful. I pay the driver and watch him turn his bike, and return without a fare to his taxi stand. He’ll go to the back of the line and wait until those in front have taken a passenger. They have busy times of the day in the morning and then in later afternoon as offices begin to empty.

I’ve made an effort to know the young men at the taxi queue in front of my building. What I’ve noticed is they keep to themselves. I rarely see them talking to a passenger. The passenger get off the bike, pay and without a word disappear. No acknowledgement of the other person. There is no exchange except the name destination and the handing over of the fare on arrival.

Where is the dignity in such a daily existence? Is it the way of all big cities that those who are at the lowest rungs are excluded from respect, dignity, and self-worth? Unless we find value and meaning in the experience of such people, the universal reply from those we exclude is alienation, suspicion and unrest. If dignity were a sustainable resource dispensed through the taxi ranks in Bangkok, and the drivers became the messengers that those around had started to notice and talk to them, acknowledge their existence, the building blocks of trust might be sufficient to construct bridges inside the larger community.

Strange things have happened. The truth is that extend and scope of a shared, common experience is the best way to measure the health of any society. Break people into enclaves of poverty and luxury, strip them of self-respect, hope and dignity and suddenly there are society’s worst fear—fellow creatures who have nothing to lose.