Off the Road

Beer in Normandy

Someone just reminded me that it’s been six weeks since I last posted a blog, leaving me in meltdown in Montmartre. You probably think I’m stuck on an endless loop round the Paris  ring road, especially if you’ve ever seen me trying to read a map. It did come quite close to happening.…. I thought at one point that if I passed the Last Exit to Versailles one more time, I might have to turn off and take tea in the Trianon with the headless ghost of Marie Antoinette. I could see a big four poster waiting for me with a sheperdhess outfit laid out on the counterpane and a bottle of champagne on the bedside table. But that might have been the cortisone talking.

I did finally escape the chic-est burbs in the world, and one day I’ll tell you the whole story of my Grand Tour of the ringroads and service stations of France. But for the moment let’s just say that I got home four days later with the feeling that I might have a nervous breakdown if I ever had to drive on a French motorway or listen to Willie Nelsons Greatest Hits again.…..

The real reason I haven’t had time to write much more exciting ……. I’ve finally got a publisher for my book Surf Mama, and I’ve been busy finishing it. 

It’s even more exciting because it had been rejected 21 times. Of course I know that you should never give up, but I’m a Pisces girl, and there are moments when we get tempted to swim downstream. Everyone tells you that lot of bestsellers have had their fair share of rejection - 21 times is exactly the same as the Dubliners, Gone with the Wind was rejected 38 times and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance 121 times. But a tiny little logical corner of my brain was telling me that there are a lot of other books that have been rejected 21 times, which you’ve never heard of for the simple reason that they never got published.

I found my dog eating the Writers Year Book this morning, and had a bit of a laugh at my systematic, highlighted attack on the UK Agents section. I was working my way through them in order - starting with ones who mentioned a specific interest in women surfing and bodypainted performance art and working my way down.

By the end of the year there were margin notes reading . Rewrite as fiction? Rewrite as historical novel? Rewrite as cookbook? Become glamour model and re-write? Marry footballer and re-write?

Then I moved on to those sites telling you that your cover letter is The Most Important Thing you’ll ever write, and you start obsessing with the idea that a comma in the right place, the perfect envelope, the right mixture of confidence and grovelling desperation will change your life forever . You see yourself as the new J.K Rowling and take a coffee break to plan which records you’ll choose for Desert Island Discs.

Cocktails in Mayfair

Then you find another site that tells you that whoever had the time to waste writing ‘How to write the perfect cover letter’ must have been an unpublished author, so you shouldn’t listen to them. Then you wonder who had the time to write this, and you start getting a headache. You see a future of embittered boredom stretching out in front of you, delete “Cover letter #37” and go for a surf.

So here’s how it happened in the end. Looking back I see a scary Sliding Doors scenario where this so easily could never have happened and I’d be on Cover letter #786 by now…..

There’s a moral in there somewhere... something like never give up on a party.

I was London and I had a rendez-vous with Sophie Parking for cocktails in Jermyn Street followed by a party in Picadilly . But I’d forgotten write down the number,  so I walked up and down the street for a while hoping to bump into her or hear the sound of ice-cubes chinking through an open window. So many men asked me if I’d got the time that I started thinking someone could make a bit of money setting up a watch shop round here. Then it clicked that I was in Mayfair wearing a low-cut red shirt and high heels. I wasn’t sure whether to be insulted to be taken for a hooker or flattered to be offered the best rates in London. I got out my notebook and wrote under Plan C. Watch shop in Jermyn Street? Prostitute?

I was about to give up and go home, but I passed by the Colony Rooms on the way to the tube and stopped in for a cup of Horlicks. As Dick stirred some marshmallows into my cup and got out the digestive biscuits, a kind stranger at the bar got out his phone and tracked Sophie down to the Embassy Club, at a party hosted by the legendary nightclub host Robert Pereno.

I’ve never met Robert before, but I could see where he’d got his reputation as a perfect host and homme fatal. He greeted me with a glass of champagne and an invitation to come downstairs and see the Burlesque strip show. I accepted the champagne, but passed on the strippers as I live on a naturist beach.

Twist my arm

We’ve been friends since that night, and the evening before my fiftieth birthday he called me up. I was in the middle of an existential crisis, to party or not to party was the question that had been driving my children crazy for the last few weeks - or years according to them. I was trying to decide what to buy myself as a present.….. champagne and tapas, or a pot of anti-wrinkle cream and a bottle of Greican 2000. It was another Pisces upstream/downstream choice I guess.

“I’m working at a publishing company called Beautiful Books. I’m handing the phone to my boss Simon Petherick. Sell him him your book.”

“Not now Robert! I’m trying to decide whether to spend my last fifty euros on Veuve Cliquot or pro-youth everlasting youth serum.”

“Here he is.”

Anyone who knows me will know that I’m the worlds worst salesman, I couldn’t sell a bottle of Perrier in the Sahara desert, but I really outdid myself this time.…. 

I shared my party dilemma with him, and then said something along the lines of;  “I’m not sure whether I should send it - I’m thinking of marrying a footballer and rewriting it in the chick-lit thriller genre to make it more commercial.….”

He said, “Have the party and send me the book.”

Surf Mama comes out next June.