Just wordling along

Well I just had to didn't I? Seeing as my better half had one, my world(le) wouldn't be complete without one

You can click on that to see the words in all their glory, and if you'd like one of your own, pop along to those lovely people at Wordle and make one for yourself. It's ever so easy.

Friday's were made for this kind of thing. Let's face it, they're not much good for anything else!

Book Review: A Million Little Pieces

The book club selection for August was the controversial best-seller by James Frey. Chosen by Oprah when it was first published, this boosted the semi-autobiographical story of a young man addicted to just about everything to the top of the best seller lists. Trouble was Oprah, and millions of other readers, didn't realise it was semi-autobiographical. Frey had embellished certain parts of the text to make the memoir more... poignant? Interesting? Dunno, but those linear Yanks didn't like it. They'd swallowed it as the gospel truth of Frey's life and felt cheated when they found out parts of it hadn't happened. Or at least hadn't happened exactly as they're depicted in the book.

Online commentaries I've read since beginning the book suggest that Europeans in general, and Brits in particular, don't have as much of a problem with this. I certainly didn't. I read the book for what it is (it may have helped that my copy is a later print run, which includes the author's explanation of why he changed some things around), and I can't say anything about it except that I was blown away. Not a phrase I use often, or lightly. I was blown away.

Frey breaks just about every rule ever written on novel writing. Or even use of English. He dispenses with quotation marks. Speech appears in the text just like exposition. The only clue to who's talking is if the speakers call each other by name, or in what they say, or very occasionally in the way they say it. This is disconcerting at first, but soon becomes entirely natural.

He almost dispenses with commas too. His first person narrative is more stream of consciousness than narration. I did this and I did that and I did the other. Sometimes even the 'ands' are omitted. Also, reflecting his extreme addiction and mental disarray at the start of the story, he frequently repeats things. Not only for emphasis or effect, but because it's the way he was thinking at the time. And although this initially looks, sounds and feels like a barrier to understanding, it too becomes natural. Surprisingly quickly. It reads like thought. A strange experience at first, but brilliantly executed so that within a few pages you don't even notice. It's like being inside his head.

Frey says that if the novel had been submitted as a piece of work to a grade class or a writing group, or on a degree course, it would have been thrown out. So many rules have been broken. So different is it from what we expect from a novel, or a memoir. Thank God for agents and editors with vision. For this is undoubtedly one of the most moving, involving and ultimately fulfilling books I've ever read. It's quite common for me to shed a quiet tear when I'm reading a well-written story. Sometimes it's just a pricking of the eyes, sometimes a welling up, sometimes the tear rolls down the cheek. This is, after all, the effect an author aims for. If you can't move your audience, what are you doing writing at all?

That said, never before has a book made me quite literally sob out loud. Uncontrollably. I can't explain what it was that struck such a deep chord with me. I am not now nor have I ever been addicted to any substance. I don't smoke. I drink the odd beer, glass of wine or gin & tonic at weekends. I have never done drugs of any kind. Chocolate is the nearest thing I could claim to be addicted to, and then only as a joke. And yet through the force of his writing I identified so closely with Frey's predicament and his journey from a wreck on the very edge of death to a man facing his future with strength and hope, that I was moved beyond any work I have ever encountered.

I will be giving this a 10 tonight. Only the second time in almost 30 months that I have awarded full marks. In this case, if I could give more, I would.

My chav side

Here's a bit of fun, coming via Diane and Nikki. Meez.com allows you to create animated avatars like this one with a host of different shapes, sizes, hairstyles and so on. When I found the mic and the karaoke bar I couldn't resist letting my dark side out. Yes, it's true, I'll take the chance to sing whenever it's offered.

There are some restrictions with these things. That, for instance, is their fattest body size. Doesn't really do my pork justice. You can't colour the beards either, so that's more like mine 30 years ago than it is today. Etc.

But what the heck. I had a laugh doing it, and if you click on the pic, you can too!

Eating the elephant

After almost two weeks of work, my list of (potential) agents is complete. I found another source and, after raiding it, ended up with 136 candidates on my green list. This may be a bit obsessive, but the scoring system I came up with is quite complex, involving marks for location, genre, positive comments on writers' forums like Absolute Write, recent sales, and website.

Website?

Yes, I was amazed to find that many prestigious agencies don't have a website. Or it's a single page with no useful information. Many of those who have no site at all are clearly, even now, not very Internet savvy. They use email addresses at aol.com, or btinternet.com or somesuch generic bollocks. What impression do these people think they are giving? They bang on about writers taking a professional approach to writing, and then don't have a modern professional approach to their own online presence. Don't they know they're listed at various info sites?

I expect much of the answer lies in how busy they all are. Agents have to filter an awful lot of dross to find the few specks of gold in the bottom of the pan. The figure "98% failure rate" for submissions is quoted in too many places for it to be anything other than an accurate assessment. But whatever the answer, I've made a decision to deal online if at all possible, so those who haven't really thought about tinterpipes have fallen down the ranking. To be honest, if I get much below halfway through that list of 136 I'll probably rethink my approach. I mean, why would I settle for a relatively small agent just because they will deal electronically when there are bigger fish who only deal with paper? It's a dilemma to be sure, but one that, at the very least, can wait for another day. I live in naive hope that I won't get down as far as the middle of the list before my genius is recognised (*vbg*).

So the agents' list is ranked and ready, but is the manuscript? My very good friend CP warned me that the work would call to me, insisting on being rewritten one more time. And it has been calling. For days. So this long weekend will largely be devoted to "one more" go-through of the whole text, and then another go with particular emphasis on the first three chapters. Since many submission guidelines want to see one or all of chapters 1-3, they have to totally rock. Best get to it...

The human face of technology

The NeuroArm robot has been in the news a lot recently. I don't know why this has just burst into the consciousness of the UK media - so far I've only managed to catch the last few seconds of every news item on it - but we've been a bit slow to catch on. There's a news article on it here dated November 2007.

Still that's the British media for you. Quick off the mark with the trivial stuff, good at making things up for a catchy headline, but when it's something really interesting and important? Almost a year behind the times. Nice one.

The little bit of the news that I have caught seems to have been focussing on people's reaction to being operated on by a robot. Despite the fact that the device works with pinpoint accuracy in the kind of surgery where being a millimetre off at the end of a gruelling six- or eight-hour op can mean the difference between life and death, will people trust it? It looks like something out of The Terminator, which is bound to be a bit worrying.

Seems to me they missed a very obvious trick here. If they wanted to give the device a more "human" face they should just have called it...

Robot de Neuro.

Are you looking at me?

Please be seated

Sofa moving day, and the morning dawned fine, but as Annie's expected arrival time of 1pm approached, so did the dark clouds.

I spent an extremely sweaty half hour chopping back the hedge to give us the best chance - well, any chance really - of getting the sofa down the side of the house. Not being much of a botanist, I'm uncertain what the hedge is, but it sure as hell grows quickly. Some sort of creeper, and there's definitely a bit of ivy mixed in with it, not to mention the ubiquitous bindweed, left to itself it renders the path impassable within 12 months.

But armed with my trusty Wilkinson Sword shears I defeated the beast, and filled our green recycle bin to bursting.

Annie arrived at the appointed hour, and after a couple of false starts where we had moved the larger of the two sofas to the conservatory door only to have the rain start up again, we carted the four-seater around the back of the house, down the path and back in through the front door. A peculiar route, you may be thinking, to travel from one room to the adjacent room, but we knew from moving-in day that the sofas would not negotiate the turn from (old) lounge to hall.

Which was the reason for my slight niggling worry that they wouldn't manage the turn into the new lounge either. But I needn't have worried. We had to take the feet off anyway to get the buggers through the front door, but that meant the lounge door posed no problem at all, and within minutes the second, smaller, sofa had followed its larger sister into the new room, and we were sitting pretty.

Annie stuck around for another hour or so to run the cables for the rear surround-sound speakers, which leaves me with just one job - to rehang the door. It waits patiently in the old lounge (which we must now get used to calling the dining room) to have its new handles and hinges fitted, and there'll be half an inch or so to trim off the bottom to allow for the new carpet, but once that's done - a job for next weekend - the New Lounge Project will be complete. We've come a long way in three months.
                   Before                                                After

Order of importance

I'm a bit behind with the reportage of our final lounge activities, so apologies for that. This entry is dated August 16 but I'm writing it a week later. I have an excuse, which I'll come to later.

Anyhoo, today was the day for finally starting to move the furniture back into the new lounge. Well, I say "back" but of course it's never been in there at all, seein' as it used to be the dining room. But let's not get too hung up on semantics.

First order of business: hanging the curtains. Which included putting the curtain rails back up after giving them a thorough clean. These are our bargain eBay curtains that Nikki found. Probably around 400-quid's-worth of curtain for £70, and they match the sofas pretty much exactly. We just don't have that kind of luck normally.

Talking of sofas, we'd arranged to move them in tomorrow with Annie's help, so for today we enlisted the large conservatory cushions, sofa cushions and spare pillows so we could all camp comfortably on the floor for the afternoon and evening viewing sessions.

Which left the final item on today's agenda: the TV. I'd been procrastinating feverishly where the telly was concerned on account of it being so heavy. 70kg. Somehow I managed to lift it off the stand by myself, and Nikki and I penguin-footed it into the lounge in short bursts. Deciding the exact position of the stand in its new home was the subject of much debate. Not too far out into the room, the right angle to be seen from both sofas, not so close to the wall that I couldn't crawl behind it to cable everything up.

The cabling isn't such a nightmare as it was the first time round, 'cos I've labelled each end of every cable with its "from" and "to" locations. Blythe looked at the pile of cables and asked incredulously: "do you know where all those go?" Yeah, but I have a plan now, so it looks easy. When I first connected the media unit, PVR, surround-sound system and XBox together it took about 3 hours and 4 attempts to get everything right. Having multiple connections for sound and video signals is a luxury, but it can also be darned confusing!

Getting the TV back on the stand? Luckily there were sufficient hand-holds for us all to pitch in, and with four people lifting, it went on like a dream.

At last! Something positive!

After many hours' work, I completed my trawl through on-line agency resources. I now have a list of 212 agents. Because I'm a methodical kind of guy (hey! nothing wrong with that! Most of the sites strongly recommend a professional approach to choosing an agent, so I'm making sure I do my homework) that list is divided into three categories:

• Green: Agents that handle my kind of material and will take electronic submissions of some kind, from an email query only in the first instance, through to a letter and three chapters as an attachment. There are some who have an online form, some who want the chapters embedded in the email, but whatever the method, they'll all deal on the net.
• Amber: Agents that handle my kind of material and require paper-based (i.e. snail-mail) submissions. Again, some of these prefer a query letter only to start with; others are happy to take chapters right off the bat.
• Red: Agents that don't do fiction at all, or if they do it's not my kind of fiction. "Why have I bothered including these in my list?" I hear you ask. Because during the course of my travels I've read that it can take up to a year to find an agent. If it takes me that long, after nine months when someone in the know asks "haven't you thought about sending it to Bloggs & Co.?" I want to be able to run my finger down my list and say, "no, because they only do children's books."

Next step is to take the green ones and rank them. Out of all the ones I could send it to, which do I think would give it the best chance? Which is the most prestigious? Which ones are actively seeking thrillers, rather than just saying they handle "commercial fiction"? Which websites give me the best feeling? Trust me, some of them are dire, and even some of the good ones give you a cold, unwelcome vibe.

Which brings me to the title of this post. My last couple of entries on the subject of agents accentuated the negative messages I'd found in my search, but the truth is these were more than counterbalanced by the positive messages many, many agents had taken the trouble to include on their sites. In advice pages, or on the "submissions guidelines" pages I found encouragement, warmth and humour and occasionally something to make me laugh out loud (in a good way this time). All of them expressed admiration for writers, and reminded their readers that just because one agent turns a book down doesn't mean it's unpublishable. Often their reasons for rejection are not really to do with the content at all, merely the genre, or the fact that they already represent someone who writes similar work and don't want a new client to compete with him or her, or they simply have too much on at that particular time. They all exhort writers to not be discouraged, to keep on keeping on. One memorable site put it like this:

"Think about a typical trip to the bookstore. There are thousands upon thousands of books there, and you can only take home a handful. Many of those books are great, but just not what you’re looking for at that moment. Don’t get discouraged, and keep going!"

So with that in mind, it's back to my list...

Magic carpet

It's not flying anywhere, but it has magical sound-deadening properties! Our new lounge no longer echoes every time the kitchen door closes - the carpet is down!

Kinda magical the way it was laid too. The fitters were here less than an hour. Mind you they love me, our carpet fitters. When they arrive the room to be fitted is always empty, and the door is always off. Just about the easiest fit they ever have - the only way it could be simpler is if there weren't any awkward corners. Well I couldn't help that. With a bay window and a hearth it was never going to be as straightforward as a square room, but they were in and out in about 50 minutes, including underlay and gripper rods.

I'm very pleased with the way it looks - exactly as we'd pictured it. This weekend will be taken up with rehanging curtains and moving the furniture back in. Assuming it'll go in of course. There's still a little niggling worry that the larger of the two sofas won't actually negotiate the turn from the hall, but we won't know for certain until Sunday. Between now and then we'll be vacuuming the darned thing every hour to get rid of all that "new carpet fluff." The kind that used to cling to my school uniform as a lad, on account of me spending most of my time on the floor.

More exciting encouragement

After trawling through P&E's list of publishers, it became pretty clear that approaching a publisher directly is probably a bad idea. I'll still have a go, but the chances of success are slim in a world where they started off poor. Slim multiplied by poor is not good. Fact is, most well-known publishers simply will not take submissions, or even queries, from people they don't know.

So I moved on to literary agents. The list here is MUCH longer. I'd already been advised to go the agency route, by two people I trust, but being a stubborn sod I had to work it out for myself too. Anyway, off I set, visiting each of the websites in turn and searching for those who (a) deal in the kind of material I've written and (b) are prepared to take queries or submissions by email. I mean, this is the 21st century, right? Any company that doesn't deal by email these days must either be mad or already have so much business they don't know what to do with that they can't possibly handle any more.

And indeed that latter argument is true in many cases. I found several dozen sites with the message "we are closed to new submissions" or similar. But for those working only with paper? Well I'm not saying I won't deal with them at all, it's just that they go to the bottom of my list of possibles. Paper is expensive for me to produce. They all want at least the first three chapters, which in my case is 118 pages. That's almost a quarter of a ream (and they insist on the good stuff), plus it would take the best part of an ink cartridge to print. With postage on top, and return postage to ensure I don't have to print it all off again, that's gonna set me back around £40 for each submission. Not to mention the environmental impact ;o)

Well if I get rejected by ALL the agencies that take email submissions then I'll have no option, but until then...

But the point of this post is to share some wonderful words of encouragement. Quite a few of the agency websites have pages of advice to both new and established authors. Not just "how to format your manuscript" (which is, annoyingly, slightly different in each case - and mandatory!) but also how to be a writer, what to expect, yadda yadda. So in amongst all this information and advice, I find this gem:

"Someone who sits down one day to dash off a thriller just for fun is not likely to succeed in the long run; nor in most cases is the casual writer who takes 10 years to complete a single book."

Well...I haven't quite taken 10 years, but I'm almost there. Should I just give up now, then? No. Thanks for the advice, but I'm not jacking it in just yet.

Writing a book is the easy part

My head is spinning. I've been searching for a publisher. Some of the purple prose on both publisher's and agency's websites is worthy of award in its own right, but this entry on a website that will remain anonymous (unless you really want to Google it, and even then...) had me laughing out loud:

But before you send us your manuscript you MUST understand a few facts:
1. Writing a book is the easy part; selling it to a publisher and then to a market is very much harder.

The easy part eh? Yeah, that'd be right. It's only taken me eight years. If that's the easy part and selling it to a publisher is "very much harder" then I'll be lucky if it gets into print before I croak. *sigh*

Then there's the word count argument. Published work is divided into "short story", "novella", "novel" by the number of words it contains. So how to arrive at that number of words? Here are two conflicting stories that coincidentally appeared on agency sites that I visited consecutively today.

Site A:
Your computer lies - you cannot trust its word counting ability. It can't even read. So, here is the quick and dirty method agents and publishers use. [with standard m/s formatting] your typed page will contain 250 words. If you have a manuscript 300 pages long, then the word count will be 75,000.

Site B:
Word Count: The three best ways for determining word count are simply
1. Use the word count feature in your word processor.
2. Use the same feature to count the number of characters including spaces and divide by six.
3. Or to use the counter to total the number of characters not including spaces. Take this number and divide by five

This is important. If you have used some sort of formula to tell you how long your novel is based on an assumed number of words per page, you're probably way off.

Good grief.

An interesting query

I put the final touches to my query letter today.

I guess I should explain that, for all you non-writers. A query letter is a writer's calling card. In many cases, when you're approaching an agent or a publisher, it's your one chance to impress.

Unlike a few years ago, a good proportion - maybe even more than half - of agents will now accept queries by email, but this is a double-edged sword. It opens the floodgates to many more queries from first-time authors and thus makes it even more important to create a stand-out query letter. You have to describe yourself, your novel, the plot and why it's the perfect novel for them to be interested in, all in 3 or 4 paragraphs and all in as compelling a way as possible.

Sound like a hard job? You're damn right. There are examples of "good practice" online, but simply taking one of these and slotting in your own details is clearly not a good idea. Thousands of others will have been there before you. That is not "stand-out."

And then there's that secret ingredient - sizzle. That's marketing speak for what makes your query irresistible. What makes it POP!

So anyway, after a lot of work and several revisions, I'm now pretty happy with my query letter. Now I just have to work out who to send it to.

All quiet on the lounge front

Nothing's ever simple, as I've mentioned several times in the past on this blog. Even the simplest job will turn out to have some weird glitch to trip you up. Yesterday's glitch was the size of my gun. Not big enough by a long shot (haha!).

Yes the day was taken up with those last few tidy-up jobs that mark the end of another decorating era. Screwing the power sockets back on, touching up the paint splashes, runs, and missed bits, sweeping up the dust and paint shavings, removing the tools from the work area.

And finally, in this case, applying a bead of sealant to the skirting boards to stop the howling gale that blows up from the sub-floor and would, if not stopped, turn the edges of the new carpet black in no time. The first tube of sealant went down without incident, being a tube I had left over from the last job. When I came to cut the seal off the next tube though, I realised I had a problem. I'd bought two trade-sized tubes of decorator's caulk, and they were just two inches too long to fit in my standard, amateur's gun.

An emergency dash to B&Q, fast becoming the highlight of every single DIY project I've ever undertaken, was called for. There are no photos on this blog entry, because the sight of me in my decorating clothes is one I don't normally share with the world. Apologies then to those few poor unfortunates who happened to choose this particular rainy Sunday afternoon for a shopping trip to B&Q, and thereby suffered an even greater shock than such an outing would normally visit upon them.

Ten pounds poorer but with a professional caulking gun in hand (and two regular-sized tubes of caulk too, in case the gun still wasn't the right size), I returned home and finished the job.

Now the lounge sits silently, emptily waiting to have its carpet laid, and every noise from the rest of the house echoes around its newly-decorated, but still spartan, walls.

I might be an anachronism

Yesterday, the painting concluded with that last coat of gloss on the skirting board and door frame. The end is nigh I tell you! It's nigh!

But it occurred to me while I was cleaning the paintbrush I'd used for the undercoat, that I might be becoming an anachronism. Or may even already have achieved it. I mean, do people still clean their paintbrushes?

It's one of those things I do without thinking. One of those "it's the way it is" things. My Dad always - almost religiously - cleaned his brushes, the same way he looked after all his tools. Carefully, lovingly, and with precision. And so, following his example, do I.

On the other hand, back then, paintbrushes and the like were relatively expensive. I don't know what proportion of his wage he would have had to spend on a new brush back in, say, 1965, but I can guarantee it's more than the 0.37% of my (weekly) salary that a new Harris costs. I know the price because I just had to buy a new one. One of my cleaning sessions wasn't quite so diligent as it should have been. A couple of days too late, in fact, to prevent the brush turning into a zombie.

When we had the bathroom done last year I noticed how the tradesmen bought new brushes (at our expense, naturally), used them once and threw them away. I'd never even considered doing this until then. To me, brushes were just part of your toolkit, to be used, reused, and looked after. Now I'm wondering if the best way to avoid filling the house with white spirit fumes, and dumping nasty VOCs down the loo, is just to not clean them in the first place. It's a bit of a culture shock that is, believe me.

We're on the level

So there was this gap in front of the fire, where the new hearth didn't quite come out as far as the old hearth. The fireplace fitter recommended self-levelling compound, as anything else would crack and to leave the gap there would cause the carpet to sag in front of the fire. He advised using a small tub, but the smallest one I could find was 5kg. Still, I thought, may as well mix it all up. I don't need it for anything else and I can just chuck away what I don't use.

There was about a teaspoonful left by the time I'd finished. It kept leaking away UNDER the new hearth. The daft buggers had just sat it there, on top of the floor, bridging over the old concrete plinth.

The compound also leaked through two or three small holes at the front as you can see here. I guess those leaks will have dripped through to the sub-floor. Luckily the holes weren't large enough for the whole mix to disappear before it set sufficiently to stop dripping.

All this does of course mean that we'll never be able to have bare floorboards in the lounge again (unless we fit new boards to this section) but frankly after years of bare floors - stripped pine in this house and laminate in the last - that's not a serious worry. We wanted it cosy, and that means carpet.

The final task for today was to apply the gloss coat to the skirting boards and door frame. This didn't have such a profound effect on the look of the room as yesterday when the undercoat went on. I knew that would be a watershed. Painting the last of the woodwork removed the only remaining rough edges and made the whole project look finished, with just a few bits of tidying up to do. Today's gloss coat just made it... err... glossier.

The rumours of my death have been greatly exaggerated

There was another John Beresford.

Actually, there are many more than two, but in my small universe, for a long time, there was only one. Me. When I moved up to "big school" rumours started to reach me of another one. He attended the other main high school in my home town and was approximately the same age. Over the years, a number of my friends met him, befriended him even, and in due course I met him too. He was, naturally, always referred to as "the other" John Beresford. Apparently, he used to insist that I was "the other" John Beresford, but that just goes to prove how misguided some people can be.

Or could be. The other John Beresford died last week.

Yesterday one of my mates called me to point out that his obit had been in the paper, and it was just possible my mother would hear of "my" death and be extremely shocked and/or worried. We agreed I'd better phone her right away to head off any such trauma.

Hello Mum.
Ooh! Hello.
I'm just phoning to let you know I'm still alive.
<long silence>
Only, you know how there was another John Beresford?
No.
Oh, well he's died. And it's been in the paper this week.
Well I don't get a paper.
No, but your friends do, and if one of them came in asking when I'd died, you'd be a bit upset.
Oh. Yes. I suppose I would.
Well it's not me.
No. Alright then.

Do you ever have those days where you wonder why you bother?

The number 8

We have a TV ad here for the HSBC bank where a room full of frantic Chinese people are bidding for a car number plate containing a single number 8. The spiel goes that the number 8 has great significance in China, where it's seen as a symbol of good luck and power. (The ad is for an account with an 8% interest rate, but that's by the by).

What I hadn't twigged until this morning, when I heard it on Today programme, is that the opening of the Olympic Games this year is seen as a VERY auspicious event in China, occurring as it does on the 8th day of the 8th month in the 8th year of the century. To maximise the good fortune, the opening ceremony will commence at exactly 8:08 Beijing time. The fanatical numerologists among you might also be interested to know that the word 'China', when converted to a number using the traditional methods, also has the value 8. Spooky, or what?

People are our greatest assets

I can't hear that phrase without a feeling of creeping cynicism. It's a mantra that HR departments and directors always trot out when they want to impress the workforce with how well we're being treated. Like the BBC hype surrounding their execrable new drama Bonekickers however, the message does not reflect the medium.

I arrived at work this morning - the first time I've been into the office for some weeks - to find a corporate email in my box. It was about business travel. Some poor graduate trainee has been given the task of analysing the business mileage data for the last year, and the message is that the top 10 drivers are responsible for 41% of total mileage claims and spend 62.5 days per year in their cars.

These incredible statistics, along with averages for the rest of us, are used to promote the message that we should all be more careful at deciding whether we drive or not, and consider alternatives such as telephones (no! really?), voice conferences, video conferences or instant messaging. So what drives the corporate need to achieve a reduction in miles driven? Is it concern for those poor employees, trapped in their cars for nearly 9 weeks of the year? Is it perhaps a recognition that we need a better work-life balance? Are they trying to reduce stress levels among the employee population? Or maybe it's a simple case of wanting to save money?

No. None of these things. They've pledged to reduce the corporate carbon footprint, and this is one of the most significant contributors.

Give me strength.

You are being very expensive, Mem-Saab

A constant stream of weekends stretches behind me during which decorating looms large as the primary activity. So it was with great joy that we kicked the lounge project into the long grass this weekend and headed off to Nottingham for a night out with friends.

The festivities started early, with champagne and strawberries on the terrace at Ian & Gill's. My, aren't we posh? Yes, we are. Well, when you've got married after being together for 25 years (or thereabouts) and you've just returned from your honeymoon, you can be forgiven for pushing the boat out a bit. And they did. Top stuff. Champagne supplies appeared to be virtually limitless, so we sat and quaffed from around 5pm to when the taxis arrived shortly after 7. And quaffed, and quaffed, qand offed, nand squiffed, ajklfc,...

Not feeling (much) the worse for wear, we poured ourselves into two taxis and headed into town, to the Mem-Saab. Situated on Maid Marian Way, not far from the pub where we spent almost every summer evening 30 years ago (the Trip to Jerusalem), this oasis of fine Indian cuisine presents an impressive appearance both from the outside, and on first entering. A cool, dimly-lit interior with lots of marble, linen, and polished wood, we were shown expertly to our table and ordered drinks and poppadums in the traditional manner.

From then on, the evening comes back to me as a series of significant events. The arrival of the food courses, the bill, the walk to the canalside bar, me adopting a rather brash American accent whenever I spoke to any of the wait staff or bar people (don't ask me why - although I heard recently of something called Foreign Accent Syndrome and started to wonder if I am a closet sufferer), the sudden decision to leave, catching a taxi. I can't remember much about what we discussed over dinner, although I know there was a lot of laughing and joking (as always).

I remember the meal being good, but not spectacular. The menu was quite disappointingly sparse, with a lot of lamb and fish dishes (not keen on either), but I did manage to find something I liked. The reshmi kebabs were excellent - very spicy and nicely textured - but the chicken jalfrezi main course was fairly mediocre. Luckily it was tempered with a very nice peshwari nan, and of course the highpoint of the night and an unexpected bonus was the excellent rasmalai we enjoyed for dessert. Probably the nicest example of this traditional dish I've had, and I've been eating it for - guess what? - about 30 years.

Not a place I could eat at frequently - there's not enough variety on the menu - but thankfully that won't be a problem as this was probably a one-off visit. Nevertheless it was definitely worth going for the experience. My initial reaction to the bill was that it was very expensive, although afterwards when I remembered we'd polished off 6 bottles of wine between the 8 of us, I revised my opinion slightly.

All that aside the highlight of the whole day, as usual, was the company. No matter how frequently or infrequently we spend time with friends, it's always a joy. We're already planning our next get-together, sometime in October. Well, you need something to look forward to, eh? And maybe the decorating will be finished by then.