I make you an offer you can’t (I hope won’t) refuse, an offer for all those who like reading and pride themselves on having an open mind. Read on and get a — very good — novel for free (wherever you live. And if you like it, for God’s sake tell your friends.)

I have in a past entry or two alluded to ‘my novel’. And given then every fart and his dog has written ‘a novel’ and, furthermore, thinks it is quite possibly the best work of art since God took a knife to Adam to get at that a spare rib and produce Eve, I cannot blame you for assuming that my allusion or two are just a writer’s wholly uncritical conceit and unabashed egocentricity.

All artists, as we all know, are utterly convinced that the whole world is just fascinated to hear every last detail about every time he or she breaks wind (though, sadly, it is usually he) and are utterly baffled that so far no cunt has the faintest clue as to who he or she is. I wrote ‘my novel’ (the inverted commas are for my sake not yours) in two spates, that is two blocks of work, sitting down every week twice a week for six or seven hours each time of solid writing, each spate about two or three months, and finished it a few years ago.

Once I had finished for a year or two (or three or four£ I, rather half-heartedly, tried to find an agent (subscribing to the conventional and sensible advice that 1) publishers are only interested in what might sell, 2) agents are your best bet as they will only take on what they think will interest a publisher. So if an agent agrees to represent you, you might have a sporting chance of being published. Funnily enough, I had no luck at all. All the agents I wrote to after looking up their name in the Artists And Writers’ Yearbook all asked you to submit a chapter or two of your novel and a synopsis. Well, that left me pretty much high and dry.

You see the trouble was — and is — that given the nature of ‘my novel’, what it is and what I tried to do, providing a ‘synopsis’ was pretty much impossible. You’ll perhaps understand that point rather better if I repeat Woody Allen’s joke about speed reading: he said he had taken a course in speed reading and would recommend it. It was so good, he said, that he finished Tolstoy’s War And Peace in just under an hour. The novel, he added, was about Russia.

I then heard of Lulu and I did all the necessary (uploading Microsoft Word files and had several copies printed. (Lulu and similar enterprises such as CreateSpace take the vanity, bullshit and profits out of vanity publishing by doing nothing but print your book, printing however many or however few you want.) It was not the first novel I had written, but it was the first of which I was — and am — proud. The first was bollocks, though it could still be resurrected, and the second wasn’t very long and I wasn’t as aware then as I am now of — well, I don’t know how to put it without sounding like a dickhead, so I shan’t put it all quite yet (but I’m alluding to words, their use beyond ‘meaning’, their sound and their baggage, what I like to call ‘their import’).

With my mention of Woody Allen and his speed-reading course, you either get my point or you don’t, but I don’t really want to tell you more. I shall however — and this is, in fact, relevant — describe a short email exchange I had a few years ago with a former — well, there’s only one way to put it, although in many ways it’s misleading — former girlfriend, a Frenchwoman, and bit actress and TV presenter who (so she told me and so my researching on the net told me) became some kind of cultural attache at the French embassy in Tokyo.

While we were still ‘together’ (the inverted commas are also relevant in as far as in the few months we were ‘together’ I saw her for about a total of three and a bit weeks in an association — I can’t but it better than that — of about nine or ten months, if that. And I must here be honest here and confess that I rather fell for her, and although she must rather have liked me, didn’t actually fall for me — perhaps she was rather taken with the naive and when she eventually gave me the heave-ho I wasn’t too chuffed) I had sent her to read a short novella, which might well have been a long story I had written and she was reasonably encouraging.

That was about 23 years ago. After having no success at all in finding an agent who could take my hand and lead me to a publisher, I thought that, given Rozenn’s previously encouraging opinion of my previous writing, if she like I might get an in from another direction. She, however, now in her early 50s, the centre of many artistic and cultural networks, was, understandably, a tad reluctant to get involved in any way with a chap she had already written off as a no-hoper. But we did exchange emails. Would you, I asked, be willing to read a short novel I had written? What, she replied, was it about? Well, I wrote, that’s a little difficult to say. Well, try, she insisted. The trouble was, I wrote, that I found it very difficult, if not quite impossible, to sum up in a few short sentences what it had taken me more than 60,000 words to convey. And, I added, if despite that she was interested in reading it and giving me her opinion, fine. If, on the other hand, she wasn’t, that was fine too. She wasn’t and that was the last I heard.

Then a colleague and friend alerted me to CreateSpace which has some kind of link-up with Amazon. CreateSpace do the same as Lulu, which is to print on demand. Unlike all the bullshit ‘vanity company’ publishers, they don’t promise to get ‘your book reviewed’ by the national and regional papers. They just print up on demand however many copies you might want. I went down that route, and that brings me to my offer.

. . .

The usual comparison I quote is that of a cook, a meal he or she has cooked and a lack of folk actually to eat it. It must be quite awful to cook a meal but then find there is no one to serve it up to. So you might understand my disappointment at having written my bloody novel and finding there’s no one to read it. Which is where you come in if you want to.

This is my offer: should you enjoy reading, and should you like to like to read my novel, simply send my your address and I shall, courtesy of Amazon, send you a copy. It will cost you nothing. You won’t have to buy it and you won’t have to pay for delivery. In fact, you won’t have to pay for anything. I simply hope that you enjoy reading it. However.

. . .

We are always advised, in a rather different context, not to judge a book by its cover. And if you take up my offer I should like to advise you to assume nothing about ‘my novel’. Don’t go by the cover, the blurb on the back page or anything. It is not a ‘difficult’ book to read, but nor is it written in the way many of the other novels you have read is written. )

The style might strike you a being a bit different. (If you like verse, it might help, but even saying that might well put off people who shouldn’t be put off, so perhaps I should better not mention it.) But I do stand by it. I — who, admittedly, wrote the bloody thing — think (in that very British way) that it isn’t half bad. Rather good, in fact. I should add that I decided to write this blog entry and make my offer after, yet again, dipping into parts of ‘my novel’ (note the inverted commas — I do hope you will agree that I am not an egomaniac) and decided that it isn’t, in it’s own very distinct way, not just quite good, but very, very good. Trouble is that, as the saying goes, we all like the smell of our own farts.

So that’s where you come in. But one caveat: as the cliche goes it’s always ‘horses for courses’ and what I have written might not, perhaps, be your course. You might want Conan Doyle, or Penelope Fitzgerald, or Brett Eason Ellis, or whoever is your favourite. But if you feel this might be your course, email me your name and address and a free, gratis copy will be on its way sooner than you can say ‘Good Lord, the man’s a genius’. And I mean anywhere in the world. We don’t cook just for the hell of it, you know. At least I don’t. And let me stress: this offer is open to everyone wherever you live. I carry the cost, you don't.

PS Several people have read it so far. Comments were: (from my 80-year-old aunt) ‘How did you know women so well?’ From my sister (who I don’t think finished reading it) ‘Nothing happens.’ From my (we’re told schizophrenic brother) ‘I burst into tears when to the final line’. From an acquaintance (an actor, once Captain Birdseye, now — occasionally — Bert Horrobin on BBC Radio 4’s The Archers) ‘Have you thought of turning it into a play?’

None of those comments was particularly encouraging. And no one, but no one, cottoned onto anything I was trying to do. Which means either they were all thick, or it wasn’t as well-written as it might have been. Trouble is that, after reading much of it tonight, I would only change a word here and a comma there. So you be my judge. It won’t cost you a penny, which must be some kind of incentive.

Here is the cover and title: make of it what you will.

You’ll be entirely wrong. You can find out more about it here.

A holding blog entry to ensure those gagging for more of my wisdom don’t turn to drink (or at least not before six) . Oh and a piece by hack of this parish Peter Wilby on another hack of this parish Paul Dacre

Not a lot going on here, you might think. And judging by the number of posts these past few weeks, you might be right. But stay true, keep the faith - I shall be back. I am planning an entry — of sorts — on one Paul Dacre who might soon be abandoning his editorship of the Daily Mail to start a B&B in the Scottish Highlands if the rumour I am about to start is to be believed.

To whet your appetite, you might care to do a little prep by reading a profile of the great man / total bastard (delete according to your own particular prejudice) here. It is not actually a link to the piece on the New Statesman website because that might not last forever and a day, but a link to my website where I have simply copied and pasted the piece by Wilby to ensure it is available. If you want to look at the original (which is not in the slightest bit different, try here.

For those who would like to know what Paul Dacre doesn’t look like, here is the cartoon by Ralph Steadman the New Statesman is using to illustrate Wilby’s piece. As Steadman is the cartoonist of choice by the Observer, you might feel the Left don’t like Dacre. And you might well be right.

PS Here’s a piece of trivia: Paul Dacre is exactly one year and one week older than I am. He also earns £1,817,000 a year more than I do, but that is perfectly understable as he is taller than I am (over 6ft, whereas I am merely 5ft 9in). Irrelevant? Perhaps, but I do feel these things should be acknowledged if we are to live in a frank and fair society where it might piss with rain for weeks on end but we can still have a laugh as the mood might take us.

A Happy Christmas to all my readers. And smartphone wallpaper takes a giant leap forward (or the wonder of it all as we think of ever more fabulous ways to fritter away our money without doing anything remotely useful)

A Happy Christmas from your favourite blogger! 

Like every other impressionable fuck who is not quite as bright as he fondly imagines himself to be, I am drawn like a bear to a honeypot to soak up every single detail whenever I come across a story about, for example, the biggest, best, most complex, most sophisticated and most expensive lavatory cleaner yet.

Reading on I discover that not only was the research into developing this revolutionary new bog cleaner undertaken by three Nobel Prize laureates! But it even has the blessing of the Pope! Furthermore, when the cleaner comes into full commercial production, the purpose-built factory making the bloody stuff will be the size of 12 football pitches! Or put another way: if the amount of paper wasted reporting such bollocks were cut into inch-wide strips and laid end to end, they would stretch from here to the Moon and back 20 times!

Perhaps even that bargain-price analogy isn’t helping you imagine the sheer scale and magnificence of the project, so try this: if all the paper wasted reporting such bollocks were repeatedly folded in two, getting smaller all the time, not only would you reach a stage where you could no longer see it, but you would create a small folded piece of paper so dense, you would create your own black hole! Well!

I’m not feeling especially grumpy today (i.e. just as grumpy as usual when I wake up in the morning and reflect that I haven’t had sex for 15 years and not had a good shag for least 17), but I got just a little grumpier when this morning - barely ten minutes ago, in fact - I began my daily round of the newspaper websites and BBC News and came across the remarkable story that ‘Europe has launched the Gaia satellite - one of the most ambitious space missions in history.’ And ‘Gaia is going to map the precise positions and distances to more than a billion stars. This should give us the first realistic picture of how our Milky Way galaxy is constructed. Gaia’s remarkable sensitivity will lead also to the detection of many thousands of previously unseen objects, including new planets and asteroids.’(You can find the BBC’s account here, the Daily Telegraph’s here, the Guardian’s here and the Daily Mail’s here. And if you take a little time to find your way around the Mail science pages, you’ll also come across the startling news that we can soon give our dogs a headset for Christmas which will allow us to read it’s mind and a smartphone app which will help make your conversation a little more interesting and make you less of a boring fuck.

Impressed or what? It might look like the Top Hat from Monopoly to you and me, but this baby cost £620 million and will clean your lavatory in under 13 seconds!
So there we have it: I can soon spend several seconds of my life gazing in rapt wonder of a colour pic of the Milky Way. Not only that, but within five years ‘boffins’ will have a complete map of all billion billion square lightyears of it and if, say, they ever find themselves in a part of it they don’t know - that it if they very get lost - they can simply consult their bloody map and find their way home again. Well! But dear reader - dear, dear reader - my immediate reaction to this utterly fantastic and sensational news was: why? Especially as it is all costing £620 million.

Don’t get me wrong: I yield to no man in my enthusiasm for gazing in wonder at colour pics of distant galaxies (I’m told) made up of a billion stars (I’m told) which do look suspiciously like the wallpaper on my smartphone and which, anyway, I forget about within two seconds of moving on. But give me a break: this whole Gaia exercise is costing a cool £620 million. And each time my one thought is: haven’t we got something more worthwhile on which to spend our shekel? Because, dear reader, make no mistake: it is your money which is being blown on a variety of Polaroids of clouds of pink, blue, yellow and red smoke. (And if you are thinking ‘what the hell, they look beautiful, just look at all that galactic dusk, doesn’t it look like smoke rising from a bonfire’, my advice to you is to go and find yourself a bonfire and gaze at the smoke rising from it: it’s just as beautiful and a lot, lot cheaper.)

I know the argument and I can hear you all now: don’t be such a Luddite, Patrick! What would have happened if Christopher Columbus had settled for a trip to Gibraltor rather taken himself off to discover the New World (well, actually a shorter route to India, but let’s not complicate matters). There would be no Disney, no hamburgers, no Fred Astaire, New York would still be a flat piece of swamp near coast, there would be no Cajun music, no grits, no Beverly Hills High, several thousand Iraqis would still be alive today. Come on, keep up, Patrick: you can’t halt progress!

This is science, man! Think of penicillin, the Pill, we’ve eradicated tuberculosis, we’ve conquered malaria, we can now know what our dogs are thinking! And why? Because of science, man, science! Ah, but dear reader wishy-washy liberal that I am despite suspicions that I am actually just a smidgin right-of-centre in my political and economic views, I can’t help but think of the cost and how that money might well be far better spent elsewhere.

We’re told, for example, that one of the biggest killers of young children in parts of the world is diarrhoea which can easily be cured by a simply mixture of sugar and salt, yet these children are not getting it. And we’re told that in parts of the world folk have to drink the same water they shit in. And we’re told that in parts of the world - mainly Africa and Asia - a great many women die giving birth purely because of unhygenic conditions.

Now wouldn’t it make just a little more sense to spend money on programmes help our young and sick and old rather than setting up cameras in space which can give us ever better, ever clearer and ever more colourful piccies of the Milky Way for our smartphone wallpaper? Or am I just another misanthropic old cunt? Answers, please, on the usual postcard which you can then tear up into samll pieces and stick up your arse.

So now we know: the universe is just a figment of some bloody Fleet Street sub’s imagination. I’ve long suspected as much. And give me a cook who cooks, not one who insists on bearing his soul and expressing himself

There are a couple of cutting edge science stories I suspect you might have missed while you’ve been giving your all to Strictly Come Prancing and Masterchef: The Professionals. They come to a grateful world courtesy of a certain paper in Britain which might well, given it’s fears for house prices and the multitude of causes of cancer, be known as the Daily Whail.

First off we have this, a dire warning that it is pretty pointless getting out of bed tomorrow (or even getting into bed tonight if you are reading this during the day) because - you guessed it: the universe is collapsing. Well! And I thought I was doomed to die of a second heart attack. Further details are here. Just in case you feel that this is just another load of the cack our free press regularly produces, you can opt for this cosmic disaster scenario instead. It is marginally more interesting, though equally as much total bollocks.

Here ‘scientists’ (it’s a wonder they don’t call them ‘boffins’ because that’s what Fleet Street’s finest usually do) postulate that - if I understand it correctly - the universe is just a hologram and just a figment of our imagination. No, I haven’t understood it correctly, but then given some of the goobledegook the Mail Online bods insists on printing (e.g. ‘In a black hole, for instance, all the objects that ever fall into it would be entirely contained in surface fluctuations. This means that the objects would be stored almost as ‘memory’ or fragment of data rather than a physical object in existence. In a larger sense, the theory suggests that the entire universe can be seen as a ‘two-dimensional structure projected onto a cosmological horizon’ - or in simpler terms [love that], the universe we believe we inhabit is a 3D projection of a 2D alternate universe.’

As I say gobbledegook and incomprehensible garbage, but that won’t stop various men - it will invariably and exclusively be men, I’m afraid - in pubs, clubs and golf club bars up and down the country boring for Britain as they insist, several rounds into the conversation, on explaining at

length a fascinating new theory they read about ‘in the paper’. Their account will most certainly be concluded with a platitude or other along the lines of ‘makes you think, doesn’t it’. No, it doesn’t. Just makes you wonder why 19/20 of the population of this green and pleasant land are allowed within 100 feet of a ballot box.

If you’re interested (and shame, shame, shame on you if you are) you can read the Mail’s story here.

All we now need is some explanation as to why it is bothering printing two such stories, both of which mean the other one must be complete bollocks.

. . .

I don’t know whether it is just my age, also my age or mainly my age, but not only is everyone, not just policemen and bank managers, starting to look decidedly younger, but much of what is on television is beginning to get decidedly more pretentious. Now I can understand it to a certain extent when we have a small gang of arty types sitting around discussing literature, drama, film and ballet, but when bloody cooks - sorry, chefs - start giving those arty types a run for their money, I do start to wish the universe really were a hologram.

The other night I was on my way home from work in Kensington to my brother’s flat in Earl’s Court when I decided I was still quite hungry. It wasn’t greed because I hadn’t eaten much at all since lunchtime and even then it was just a mug of soup and two small rolls. So passing the Dragon Palace, a Chinese restaurant of the parish (and where a few weeks ago I bumped into a certain Paul D. and promised not to talk to him when I also dropped in for a plate of something or other), I decided that to have a latish supper (and no, I didn’t bump into Mr D. this time).

On such occasions - I often have a plate of pasta nearby on a Sunday night - I tend to haul out my excellent Huawei smartphone and seek out a wifi signal to watch a bit of TV. As it happened there was none at the Dragon Palace, so I gave 3G a whirl. Oddly, althought 3G is good for radio, I’ve never before had much luck with TV, but last Tuesday night it worked a treat. Must be something to do with the universe collapsing or other, though don’t hold me to that, I’m not much good on science and rely on our free press to keep me informed on advances in science. (Apparently scientists now know why dogs scratch themselves, which must come as a relief to all those who were a tad disturbed by that particular gap in our scientific understanding of the world.)

Having got a signal wasn’t really the main problem, however. What now stumped me was what to watch on my smartphone (courtesy of BBC’s iPlayer, by the way, if you’re wondering). You see, I don’t really watch a great deal of TV these days because a great deal of TV these days is so fucking dull on the whole I prefer to sit in the bathroom for hours on end and pick my nose. But rather than sit and talk to myself - people often think you’re nuts when you do that - I decided to give something a go while I worked my way through a plate of something spicy with noodles and settled on Masterchef: The Professionals.

I don’t doubt that the television concept of Masterchef has travelled around the world several times over these past few years but for those still unacquainted with the programme and its ilk all I can say is: don’t worry, you’re not missing much. (There is a variant of it here in Old Blighty called Celebrity Masterchef which is equally as dull.) Don’t get me wrong: I happen to enjoy cooking very much and was very happy watching cookery programmes many years ago when they were still about cooking and learning new techniques and dishes. But they aren’t any more. They are all about ‘competition’ and ‘being passionate about wheat/mushrooms/carrots/lard’ and ‘boiling a kettle of water doesn’t get harder than this!’, cue dramatic music.

In the particular episode I saw last Tuesday (or of which is saw part, because mercifully I had finished my plate of something spicy with noodles long before the programme was due to end), the emphasis was on ‘putting your emotions and feelings into a dish’.

OK, it wouldn’t be at all difficult to make me out to be some sort of cantankerous old sod for complaining that that is 24-carat, grade A bullshit, but if that is the direction you’re thinking is now taking you - that I’m just another old fart for not being intrigued by the mystery of cooking - then you are banned from ever reading this blog again. But don’t take my word for it - after all, I am the Luddite fuck who refuses to believe the universe is about to collapse - so here are a few snippets: (t/c)

Why the ‘historic’ agreement with Iran is mainly just good for business. Which is what it was all about, really

If you follow the news at all, you can’t have missed all the hoo-ha about the recent ‘historic’ agreement between Iran and the West, but it was – to me, at least – quite noticeable that details of what exactly had been historically agreed were quite sparse.

There was a certain amount of spurious drama about it all, what with the talks apparently coming to naught a few weeks ago, to everyone’s disappointment and the finger being pointed at the French for being pernickety, then out of the blue came the breakthrough, and the U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and our very own Foreign Secretary William Hague as well as their counterparts from Germany, Russia, China and someone described as ‘Baroness Catherine Ashton’ dropped everything, grabbed their toothbrushes and took the first flight out to Geneva for an historic photo opportunity, sorry, make that ‘agreement’.

When news of the ‘breakthrough’ came through, I was rather baffled as to what had actually been achieved, because apart from being told the ‘agreement was historic’ and that ‘sanctions would be partially lifted’, no on actually said what had been historically agreed. To make it all the more confusing, on the one hand Iran’s foreign minister Abbas Araqchi immediately announced that agreement was a great deal for Iran in that the West had agreed to loosen sanctions and that it could carry on enriching uranium, although to a lesser degree than it had done so far; on the other hand John Kerry announced that it was a great deal for the West because as it had agreed to loosen sancstions, Iran had agreed to give up enriching uranium completely.

Well, they couldn’t both be right, I thought, and why haven’t news reports highlighted the discrepancy (which they hadn’t – they were spending far too much time trying to persuade us how ‘historic’ it all was and that now, surely to goodness, there was certainly no reason why everyone shouldn’t start sending each other Christmas cards and start going to each other’s drinks parties again (which is what diplomats do, apparently). But I was still puzzled.

The question remained stubbornly unanswered: what had, in fact, been agreed after all those high-level, late-night talks in Geneva? I was doubly intrigued when yesterday I came across an interesting news report on Der Spiegel’s online site, the first sentence of which ran: ‘Der Durchbruch im Atomstreit mit Iran lässt die Deutsche Industrie jubeln: Maschinenbauer, Chemiebetriebe und Zulieferer der Auto- und Flugzeugindustrie hoffen auf gute Geschäfte. Doch sie bekommen Konkurrenz von unerwarteter Stelle: Auch US-Firmen wollen profitieren.’ Loosely translated: The breakthrough in the row with Iran about uranium enrichment has got German industrie cheering: machine manufacturers, chemical works and car and aircraft industry suppliers are hoping to do good business. But they face competition from an unexpected source: US companies want some of the action’. You can read the report for yourself here.

Put aside the Spiegel’s apparent surprise that competition from US companies was ‘unexpected’ (was it really ‘unexpected’ and why is the Spiegel surprised?), here you have in black and white why after several years of sanctions the West and Iran suddenly found themselves able to reach a ‘historic’ agreement with which everyone is happy.

We have been getting news reports since the sanctions were imposed how they were biting, prices were rising ever higher and inflation was growing sharply, and even that if the shortage of goods caused by the sanctions worsened, there might even be civil unrest. But when I read that Spiegel story it all became very clear to me indeed: it wasn’t just Iranians and Iranian companies who were suffering. So were a great many firms in the West (and probably China). Bugger whether the Iranians were or were not building nuclear weapons, the sanctions were increasingly bad for business. And I don’t doubt that they all informed their respective governments as much in no uncertain terms.

Is that too cynical an interpretation? Not at all: as George Bernard Shaw put it very succinctly: The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it. Or here’s Ambrose Bierce’s take on such cynicism: a cynic, he says is ‘a blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are not as they ought to be’.

It was then that I decided to try to track down what was in the agreement. It didn’t take too long, although the so-called ‘serious’ journalists on the BBC website, The Telegraph and the Guardian didn’t bother recording it. Finally, I find it – or rather a link to a pdf of its text – on the Financial Times website. You can read the ‘historic’ agreement for yourselves here. It didn’t knock my socks off, but there again, at least its back to business as usual for those who care about such things.

PS Sunday, Dec 01: At least we can be reassured that our governments aren’t in danger of doing something wildly out-of-character and risking the status quo.