Day in the Life of a Writer Close To Finishing A First Draft

1. Woken up wayyyy too early by BlackBerry flashing with the message "Write 1000 words of Jaguar - NOW!" Lie awake for ages, unable to stir from bed.

2. Oldest daughter invades to fleece me of what little shrapnel I have. "I haven't got my PIN yet!" is the usual excuse for the ongoing cash drain. Youngest daughter is sleepy and wants cuddles. How can I resist? Husband prepares packed lunch and breakfast for little 'un, then takes her to school, all to leave me free to write. But I just stare in fascination at FaceBook. There's a MyFlickr app! Cool; install it. Apparently apps could be the death of Facebook - people are getting cross with all the zombies and jedi vs sith silliness. I say: if you don't want the app, Dile que no.

3. Check out all my friends blogs and post comments. Email a dear friend who's back in touch via LinkedIn. Check my favourite writer's websites. Read short stories on fiction website. Finally shower, dress and look at the chunk of writing I have to do today. It's a foot chase through Old Havana. Rooftops will feature, because hey, it's Havana! So will the Malecon, because, well, IT'S HAVANA.

4. Read some of Alejo Carpentier's 'The Chase' to get in the mood. Browse my photos from Cuba, to get in the mood. (There aren't enough of rooftops. I looked down over rootops every day in Havana - what was wrong with me - why didn't I take more of rooftops?) Watch the rooftop party scene from Habana Blues, to get in the mood.

5. Finally in the mood, write the Old Havana chase scene; 800 words. That'll do - half a chapter and I left at a good place - the rooftop chase begins.

6. Pick up littlest daughter from school, acquire 3-year old neighbour boy on the way. Pick apples from our tree. Bake a pie together. Make pesto for tea. Experiment with a new daiquiri that uses fresh pink grapefruit juice and just a hint of coriander. (gently, gently bruise about five coriander leaves in the glass part of a shaker, add 1/2 shot freshly squeezed lime juice, 1/2 shot of gomme, 1 shot freshly squeezed pink grapefruit juice, 2 shots light rum, shake in Boston shaker with plenty ice, fine strain into a chilled martini glass.)

7. Discuss my teenager's complex love life with her and reluctantly help her to plan a strategy with latest love interest. (It was that or talk all night long.)

8. Laundry. Who doesn't love laundry? NOT! I read in some newspaper article that Mrs Thatcher admitted that getting the fluff out of the dryer was one of the small pleasures of her life. I try it. It's surprisingly satisfying - comes off in three nice clean layers.

7. Eat pie whilst reading today's 800 words. Polish. Write this blog entry.

5000 words to go, by my estimate, until I finish the first draft of 'Jaguar's Realm'. I planned this ending ONE YEAR ago, but last week I thought of a major tweak that has allowed me to keep the pace and drama going strong all the way through Act 3. At least that's the plan, and that's why I plan. Things can only get better from a strong plan.

Writing the first draft, truly, is so much fun. I even enjoyed first drafts when I had no agent and no publisher. The story is all yours then and you're the first one to read it.

And look...only 8pm. Still time to go salsa dancing at Freuds...

But I'm too tired.

Introspective, moi?

I don't usually turn to introspection on this blog because well, basically, it's not very fun is it? It gets awfully close to that writer's angst I try to avoid.

But today, just now in fact I had a moment of clarity in which I realised that being a published author is going to make me not more interesting as my teenage daughter imagines, but less.

(My teenage daughter observed recently, "I'm looking forward to your book being published. Then maybe your life will finally become interesting. And you'll have things to tell me. Instead of it being the other way round.")

I read an article about something, can't remember what, and was just starting to form a theory, synthesize a thought, who knows it might even have been interesting...when a very strict part of my brain cut in and said NO.

NO. You can't think about that. It might be interesting but NO. It's not relevant to the books you write. It's potentially too interesting to think about as a leisure activity. It's not comforting enough to justify as a daydream. So: simply NO.

That strict part of my brain has a propensity to let me think all I like about the stuff that it deems relevant to my job and hardly at all about anything else. There were times when I was a scientist that I literally turned up at parties unable to speak. I forgot how to make small talk. I didn't want to talk about anything but molecular biology, and no-one at the party wanted to hear about that so...I said nothing.

So I can imagine that what will happen in the next few years is that I will think more and more about my books. At the moment I can count on the fingers of a hand the number of people who have ever wanted to have any discussion with me about my books that goes beyond "You're writing a book, really, what's it about?"...my reply and then, end of discussion.

What if it were lots of people, though? What if that becomes all people ever want to talk to me about?

Then I'll be back where I was in the old days, when I was mad keen to talk about subcloning DNA or whatever part of my research I was up to...and good for little else. Except now the only thing I'll be capable of talking about is a bunch of stuff I made up once.

I'll be back to being a nerd.

Actually I'm being daft. I could right now make a list of 10 friends who will NEVER want to hear about my books. They should help to save me from becoming a total bore.

Forever Mexican - Chiiidoooo

Mexico's President Felipe Calderon recently said "Where there is a Mexican, there is Mexico."

Well hurray for that! Because apparently the cost of being naturalized as a British citizen has roughly tripled since last year, when I last filled in the forms and didn't get round to sending them, and at around £655 I'm not quite sure it's in my range anymore. Priced out of the market! It's probably a quite sensible ploy to avoid undesirables like me becoming British. Quite right too. What Groucho Marx said.

So I'm to be forever Mexican and only Mexican. Which means that there's a little bit of Mexico right here in Oxford.

PUES ME PARECE BIEN CHIDO.

MG and DB

Here's my good friend DB, who I inherited from the one time in my life that I was ever in a Clique. It was at St Cross College, Oxford and for some reason the cool American grad students welcomed me into their urbane little set, who would always sit at the same table for lunch and watch as the Goddess Hoku opened her mail (often actually addressed to her as that...), and have cool nicknames for some of the more distinctive dons (we had a Panzer Fuhrer, a Yoda, Obi-Wan, and a Dingleberry). I'd always kind of admired the group from afar; when I eavesdropped their conversation it sounded like the Algonquin Round Table meets the Star Wars Fan Club.

I first got an 'in' with them when I overheard Hoku talking about my beloved PJ O'Rourke, whose book "Republican Party Reptile" I owned and loved, and whose new book "Holidays in Hell" was just out. Hoku and I became life-long friends following our walk to the bookstore to each buy a copy of HIH.

The group would meet in someone's college room for video evenings to watch shows like "Sledge Hammer!" and "Rocky and Bullwinkle", which were all new to me. We'd eat pizza and play with Legos. These were the type of people I'd never come across before at Oxford - right-leaning, funny, educated, witty and cosmopolitan American liberal-arts students. I was totally smitten.

This was back when there was still an Evil Empire and we had a gazillion Soviet nukes aimed at our heads, when the GDR was still cool in a grimly-socialist-black-and-white-movie sort of way - it wasn't like being a neocon or anything. One of the group, Peter Schweizer, had spent time with Washington bigshots and had published a book entitled "Grinning with the Gipper: The Wit, Wisdom, and Wisecracks of Ronald Reagan"

But as people invariably do in Oxford, they left. Eventually only two local hangers-on were left: me and DB.

We didn't really know each other at first. The group was big enough that we'd only chatted at the periphery. When we exchanged phone numbers at the farewell party of the last of the group to leave, I wondered vaguely if we'd ever meet again.

We did though, and I'm glad because DB has been one of my best friends for years, through thick and thin. She wrote weekly limericks to cheer me up through one gloomy bit of my life, I stripped wall-paper with her when she bought a cottage that needed EVERYTHING doing. I introduced DB to the concept of Murder Mystery parties and then DB expanded and improved upon the concept until they were a thing of minor legend, at least in Hertford College MCR.

DB tempted me out for tapas, cocktails and a movie last night. We saw "The Lives Of Others", the winner of last year's Best Foreign Film Oscar. I haven't seen such a touching, beautifully constructed and performed film for a long time. Everything about the film is just brilliant.

Fundamentally it's a story of unrequited love and how a dutiful state security official metamorphoses into a Good Man when he falls in love with someone who he can never have, but who through her plight opens his eyes to the wrongdoing in his own occupation. It's a film which sticks rigidly to Robert McKee's stern advice to screenwriters that MEANING produces EMOTION. (As opposed to loud explosions and car chases...)

Great movie - thanks DB!

19th Century Tradition Rules OK

The St Giles' Fair is an old Oxford tradition that goes back to the 19th century, whereby a group of local fairground companies have use of one of the main streets of Oxford for the first two days in September, after St Giles Day. And the schoolchildren of Oxford can spend the last days of their school holiday being entertained in top carnie fashion.

My two daughters and I took the usual reccie this evening. Looking at the mixture of horrific sick-inducing machines and charming old kiddie fairground rides, my older daughter, 15, remarked sourly that she felt none of the usual excitement. She said the same thing at Disneyland Paris a couple of weeks ago. Yep, it happens; you grow up. But she hasn't yet discovered how much fun St Giles' Fair is when you visit in the evening and slightly tipsy. with a crowd of student pals...

Meanwhile our five-year old was cooing with delight. She wants to throw hoops around stuff and win cuddly toys, (she only has about 40 and there are places in her bedroom where you can still see the floor, so I guess that's her rationale there...); to ride on the Waltzer under the influence of travel sickness pills, to eat huge fluffy balls of freshly spun cotton candy, hot doughnuts straight out of the oil, corn-on-the-cob roasted on a grill, to dip fudge, marshmallows and strawberries in a chocolate fountain, and then to ride the magnificent Carousel. You don't actually get any younger, like with the one in Ray Bradbury's novel 'Something Wicked This way Comes', but riding it, you might feel, for just a few moments, that you've turned into a little kid again.

It's one of the great things about being a parent, living vicariously through all your children's joyous discoveries in life. But tomorrow, after all those fairground treats and being whipped around on rides, I may need to swing by the vomitarium...

Cocktail Memories

Tired of the substandard cocktails on sale at most of the bars we frequent - which are admittedly not known for their cocktails, but are in walking distance of the house and have a happy hour - I asked my husband to do something about it.

So for my recent birthday I received a collection of professional cocktail-making equipment; proper Boston Shakers, ice strainers, muddler, ice-crusher, shot measure, fine strainer and most of the main spirits and some of the syrups necessary for a nice repertoire and most importantly, a copy of the latest Diffords. (Diffords is the definitive guide to cocktails. Every recipe will make the BEST version of that cocktail that you've ever had.)

My baby brother lives in a tiny village in the mountains Switzerland, not far from fancy-schmancy Gstaad, but not within walking distance. When he moved out there, he decided that the posh cocktails of his native London would be too hard to miss, so he decided to learn the art himself. And boy does he make a mean cocktail! (But don't help yourself to the pineapple juice from his fridge or you'll get yelled at for using a cocktail ingredient!). He acted as the authoritative consultant on what to buy, strictly advising the proper equipment, even if it takes a bit of practice to use a Boston Shaker.

For my birthday party we invited a select group of four people (I didn't want to spend the entire evening mixing cocktails after all), I made a menu of about 20 cocktails I was prepared to make, and we went for it.

And Diffords came up with the goods! Simply by exactly following the instructions I was able to make amazing, yummy cocktails including Daiquiri, Pina Colada, Ron Collins, Cosmopolitan, Maple Leaf (bourbon, triple sec, maple syrup), Dry Martini, Coolman Martini (vodka, triple sec, lime juice, apple juice).

It turns out not to be so hard. Like all cooking, the secret is to use top notch, fresh ingredients, have great recipes and follow them.

One of my friends offered to hire me for her birthday party. Yay! A backup career!

Anyway...I was swapping cocktail reminisences with my agent recently and thought it would be a fun thing to blog.

Here are my top five cocktails ever tasted (not counting the ones I made t'other day...) Please let me know yours!

1. Daiquiri in Floridita London.
Straight-up, not frozen. Dizzyingly strong and refreshing. I made a mistake on the second and went for the Hemingway. Stick to the Classic.

2. Margarita in San Angel Inn, Mexico City
Straight-up, not frozen. We visited this restaurant, once one of Mexico City's most elegant and expensive, during a big local recession which made it very cheap for us. The place was almost empty. The margaritas were served inside metal cups containing dry ice to keep the glasses cold. Ahhh...

3. Dry Martini in Japp's Martini & Cigar Bar in Cincinnati, Ohio.
I was there on a business trip and I SWEAR the guys from that software company were trying to see how drunk they could get me! But what a martini. Later we went dancing to a swing club. Dancing the Lindy Hop, a guy tried to do an air-step with me and I ended up flat on my back. I DON'T DO AIR-STEPS AND YOU ARE SUPPOSED TO ASK! Luckily I was so drunk that I was very relaxed.

4. Frozen Daiquiri in Sancti Spiritus, Cuba
Like smooth, lime+rum flavoured, cool silk.

5. Pina Colada at the poolside bar of the Acapulco Princess, Mexico
Made with fresh pineapples and fresh coconut cream, the fruit all piled up at the bar. I read "The Da Vinci Code" whilst addled by a long afternoon drinking these.

Professor Pete

One of the best things about staying in Oxford years after you've failed to escape the gravitational pull of the University is the fact that once in a while you get surprise phone calls out of the blue from friends who used to study or work here, wanting to drop by for dinner while they are in town giving a seminar/visiting a library or a lab.

In the next two months we're due a number of these visits, but yesterday we were thrilled by a pop-in from our old friend Professor Peter Simpson, who I believe I have mentioned at least once on this blog.

Pete teaches philosophy at the City University of New York and is self-confessed Aristotelophile. We became friends many years ago, in fact Pete is one of the many dear friends I inherited from my mother. Back when he was a young graduate student trying to impress my mother, he took my sister and I to movies and introduced us to Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

Nowadays Pete is high on my list of the cleverest people in the universe. He wrote a book about Pope John Paul the Great in which it was clear to any reader that he actually understood all that continental philosophy stuff...! (Not me; I'm more comfortable with the writings of the current Pope Benedict, whose work is at least couched in language and concepts I can follow...)

I told Pete how I'd fallen under the influence of his beloved Aristotle when writing the second of the Joshua Files books. (Fellow writers, if you haven't read the Poetics yet, I can't recommend it enough.) I mused aloud how it was possible for one guy to be so incredibly prolific as Aristotle apparently was, dominating his contemporaries across both natural sciences and political philosophy, as well as knocking out a 42 page masterpiece in which he explained and laid down the principles of western drama, principles which stand to this day.

Pete's answer was very interesting. "It's because he was such an empiricist. He used exactly the same technique as when he analysed the world of animals - he first collected data, looked for patterns and governing principles. He collected all the Greek plays he could get hold of, especially the award-winning ones. He had his students help him complete the analysis."

So Poetics wasn't just the work of a guy who sat musing and philosophizing about what he'd seen down the Greek theatre - it was a scientific approach to the understanding of dramatic structure.

The benefits of a scientific education, hey? I can't say enough good things about one. (Although I also wish I'd been trained to think with the razor-sharp logical clarity on philosophical matters as Professor Pete. He could argue the hind legs off a snake! First he'd argue the case for the legs...)

Georgina's, just the way it used to be

Georgina's
Originally uploaded by mgharris

You might think of Oxford as a pretty traditional place where things don't change that much. But that's not how it is at all. In the twenty-odd years that I've lived here almost every part of the city has been altered, improved, developed. Even the colleges have cleaner stone and a modern block, sometimes even sympathetically designed, like new wings of Magdalen and Linacre.

So if you're in a nostalgic mood, where can you go for a hang-out that hasn't changed in 20 years?

I can name two: Georgina's Coffee shop and Brown's Cafe, both in the covered market.

Georgina's serves salads, flapjacks and bagels, the ceiling is plastered with movie posters and they play non-stop indie rock music loud enough that you have to talk at a level which makes the whole place swing with youthful energy. Youthful because then as now the cafe is a favourite haunt of students.

I snapped two such youngsters, Matt and Beth, sitting in what used to be one of my favourite tables.

23 years since I arrived here! That's brilliant (cos I always dreamed of living here) as well as a bit sad (cos I could never bear to leave).

A pal of mine, the Aristotelophile Peter Simpson, once told me that I would only leave Oxford in a box...

Hell no! They can bury me here!

Emailed from my BlackBerry®

Oxford traffic locks down

Oxford traffic locks down
Originally uploaded by mgharris

Why did my rare, one day away from my desk have to turn into a battle with the elements? From aquaplaning all over country roads this morning to being stuck in one of Oxford's legendary total gridlocks...I'm 2 minutes from home but doubt I'm going to be there for 30.

On the bright side, it brings back happy memories of rainy summer afternoons stuck for hours on Mexico City's Periferico.

I wish I'd gone to the loo. How true it is that ladies should never miss an opportunity to pop into the ladies.

Yes I'm driving as I blog this. It's okay...it's an automatic.

Crumbs.

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Dropped by the office...

Dropped by the office...
Originally uploaded by mgharris

Decided to spend the day out of the house so that I don't have to find excuses not to write. I even dropped by the office to see how the guys are doing. This is a photo of me with our senior technology consultant, Matt Banks, a guy so good-looking that when we had our company photos done, the photographer reckoned that he could get Matt work as a model. Matt is making a rude gesture with his fingers, in the general direction of the MD, Mark Salisbury.

I am going to look at a snazzy new, freebie content management system. Woo.

More photos on Flickr...


Emailed from my BlackBerry®

Le Petit Dejeuner des CrackBerries#3

Le Petit Dejeuner des CrackBerries#3
Originally uploaded by mgharris

All right luv, stop taking photos of me...

Seriously though, have you ever been out with another BlackBerry addict?

There's little call for conversation.

What a world. It's not just that my attention span will barely make it through a TV show these days but I've taken about 40% of my social life online too.

A friend on Jaiku told me that she and her hubby were going to a Café Rouge for breakfast this morning and because I'm such a sheep I thought David and I could do the same. By crikey it's nice. Ersatz France, with French pop music and all... Reminded me how much I'm looking forward to spending time in France next month as we drive through to visit my baby brother in Switzerland.

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Dotcom daftness again? Or is it real?

It's the sort of idea that we used to talk about breathlessly in innovation centre coffee meetings with other Internet entrepreneurs, swapping stories of the latest daft idea to get a squillion dollars of funding. Not that the ideas we had weren't daft too. My best conversations were with then Oxford graduate student Alex Straub, of the splendidly daft mondus.com (hey, I too was a believer once), who probably personally made a few million from Italian investors Seat Pagine Gialle before mondus went belly-up. Back in 1999 Alex and I would go all googly-eyed at crazy Internet ideas, the madder the better.

So here's the idea - and it comes from a DPhil Biochemistry student at Oxford. (Hurrah for the biochemistry training - it's so darned versatile!)

A website where you buy moments in time. Your first kiss, it's suggested, or perhaps the moment you were offered a book deal. For $1 per minute you get to baggsy that moment and upload content which will be hosted in perpetuity, to share and share again with everyone in the world.

Thomas Whitfield apparently pitched this to Dan Wagner, himself a wily Internet entrepeneur, the guy behind the business information service M.A.I.D and then Dialog...and now the investment fund Bright Station Ventures, at a competition run by the Oxford Entrepreneurs. Instead of giving the £5,000 prize, Dan Wagner offered Whitfield and his associates access to the whole $100 million fund to develop and idea that I'm guessing they think will be the new Youtube. Wagner thinks that Designthetime (now known as miomi) captures the whole zeitgeist of the Internet.

Except...Youtube, Facebook, MySpace and all those sites on which we all frantically upload content to our hearts content...are free. What's to stop Yahoo or Google setting up something like this, and not charging?

When the whole dotcom thing collapsed it did so largely because most of the new businesses had non-existent revenue streams, and were spending money much, much faster than they could possibly make it. The smart money flew away and settled on the few safer bets, like Google and Yahoo. So respect is due to these guys for building in a user-driven revenue stream from the beginning. But will people pay for this frivolity? It will be interesting to see.

I can't see how this won't be imitated. For one thing, what will I do when I discover that my special moment has been nabbed? Will I upload content for my second favourite moment? Or will I go to a rival site, one that's quite possibly free?

I like being all sceptical, but deep down I really hope it works. It was a great feeling, the belief that a graduate student could spin a yarn and end up running a multi-million dollar business. I Googled Alex recently - he looks to be doing pretty, pretty fine.

Degrees of Separation: Two

In the space of less than 10 hours I had the uncanny experience of having 2 degrees of separation from two of Britain's best-loved children's authors. Not via their agents, publicists, etc, or anyone in the industry; I wouldn't count that. No; I'm talking sheer coincidence.

Lookit: Yesterday, we're having lunch in Brighton, celebrating the First Holy Communion of our friends' daughter (her parents are enlightened atheists...). Two of the guests haven't seen me since I first started writing novels a few years back. They ask me to fill them in on the progress since then. "Someone I know at school - a parent - writes childrens' books," one of them says. "What's his name now? He's always saying how competitive it is." Later she remembers his name: Anthony Horowitz. "My nephew's favourite writer," I tell her. "My nephew keeps asking me if maybe one day I can get his autograph."

Much later that day we walk into Xi'an, the Szechuan Chinese restaurant owned by my pals Amy and Gary. Gary tells me over the bar that Philip Pullman used to be his teacher at Bishop Kirk, once a middle school in Summertown. "He comes in here sometimes," Gary says cheerfully. "He still remembers me! Tells me how I used to misbehave in class!" Then Gary tells me that Amy is giving lessons in Mandarin. I should learn, he says, so that I can one day converse with Chinese readers of my books. Gary does a quick mental calculation about what tiny proportion of the Chinese would need to read the books to make me a millionaire.

I love it when my friends are this optimistic. More power to the positive visualisation!

How to be thin - don't eat enough

Well it's all downhill for me, intellectually speaking. I'm experiencing a strange symptom of what is probably an early-onset form of dementia. It's this: I've completely lost the ability to guesstimate how much pasta to cook to feed a family of four.

I used to be an overestimater, if anything. I figured that extra was always good, because you could always make tomorrow's lunch. But now through no intentional action of mine, I'm an underestimator. When I cook pasta - which is something I cook at least three times a week - even though they all howl with disappointment. Not just that it's pasta (boo!) but that there's not enough. They're always still hungry.

It reminded me of when I was growing up. We were never, ever given meals that left us feeling satisfied. My stepfather had grown up during the post-war rationing period and believed in small portions. (It was different in Mexico, obviously, where you could eat until you popped and proud relatives would stand by going 'Look how well she eats!')

But I was stick-thin until I was about 20, so this not-eating-enough thing clearly has something going for it. I'm sticking to the underestimating and telling my family to be glad of going to bed hungry. I try to fool them by heaping salad on top so they don't notice the pitiful serving of pasta underneath. When they complain, I growl, "S'more than I used to get, so think on!"
They don't listen though, these kids. They head for the cupboard and eat big spoonfuls of peanut butter.

P.S. No-one suggest using a balance, please. Weighing ingredients is for cissies who can't cook in anything but a properly-equipped kitchen. That's not the way I was taught Domestic Science by Mrs Blackwell. It's acceptable to weigh amounts for confectionary and high-end baking - say French pastries - but nothing else.

The principle can transfer to some aspects of laboratory work. I speak as one who even learned to make tissue culture medium and bacterial growth broths by flicking out The Right Amount, who added DNA and restriction enzymes in amounts we referred to in the lab as A Smidgeon, A Wodge and A S***load. (a s***load was 10 microlitres, just to give you the scale)

I am becoming an airhead with the attention span of a five-year old

Actually, my five-year old daughter has a longer attention span than me.

Sometimes I wonder what on earth has become of me. I used to listen to Bach and Mozart and Palestrina and sing in choirs and have a season ticket to the orchestra and read a book a month at least, as well as a bunch of scientific papers, watch TV for hours at a stretch and have dinner parties where people tried to make intelligent conversation.

Well, stuff all that. Now it's work, family and salsa.

My friend Nathan has the same issue. We did the middle-aged stuff in our twenties and now we live for our nights out on the town. My friend Dr. Rebecca too, who won the Gibbs prize for Biochemistry in our year at Uni - she's out dancing 3 or 4 times a week, hooking up with Cuban hotties and whatnot...

I can't watch TV for more than 30 mins without having to get up and see who's on MSN. I prefer simultaneously to chat to my cousins on MSN, read blogs and post to my own, and watch Youtube videos than to watch TV. (I KNOW!!! What the heck?!)

And...gah...I haven't finished reading a novel for ages. I can still read non-fiction, just.

I probably need a brain scan. I think the pod people have got me.

But you know what? I feel like Tom in that Tom&Jerry cartoon where Tom inherits a million dollars, on condition that he does no harm to a living creature, EVEN A MOUSE, and after struggling to restrain himself, he gives in and goes back to persecuting Jerry, saying "I'm throwing away a million dollars...BUT I'M HAPPY!"

Now. Who's on MSN...?

Living Like Bloody Millionaires...

This was my mother-in-law's favourite response when my then boyfriend and I would go off together as students, to exotic places like Spain and Italy, (other people we knew went to Tibet and Thailand, but, yanno...) or eat out more than twice a month.

We love the phrase and use it all the time now. "Going out to breakfast? Oooh...yer living like bloody millionaires...!"

Reading Fortune magazine over coffee this morning, I noticed that they had a special section which might as well have been entitled 'How To Live Like A Bloody Millionaire.'

(I don't know why we get Fortune magazine. Neither of us remembers subscribing, but there it is every month, along with the Speccie and Time.)

They actually called it 'Life At The Top'. It is a guide to how you can spend eye-popping amounts of money on bags, cars, golf clubs, wine, and featured a brief interview with Cartier's North America boss Federic de Narp, improbably handsome and sleek, giving tips about shoes, shirts, briefcase, coffee, watch (mai, bien sur...), where to have lunch, what brand of umbrella...

I notice that they didn't ask him about his exercise regime. US businessmen have to be all about the daily workout regime (like Haim Saban, featured elsewhere in the issue) and 'visionary futurist' Ray Kurzweil who reckons that exercise, diet and 230 daily supplement pills has slowed his aging process. I'd like to think that the European alpha male can still put style, elegance and culture before a slavish devotion to the gym. But I doubt it. You don't keep a figure like de Narp's or Antonio Baravalle's, the molto sexy head of Alfa Romeo, without some work. European businessmen probably keep that sort of thing quiet.

My poor father wouldn't have enjoyed this brave new world of sushi and pilates. He revelled in the three-course, boozy working lunch that finished with brandy and a packet of cigarettes, where exercise meant the distance you had to walk from your chauffeur-driven car to your next meeting. Which may have contributed to his death aged 46.

I must have something of an Electra complex though, because the sight of a handsome businessman in well-tailored, dark blue pinstripe suit, white shirt and tie makes me weak at the knees...

A Guilt-Free Pastime

Watching an Almodovar movie late last night, I dimly remember hearing a terrific line before sleep overwhelmed me. It was something like "A real Chanel? Babe, how am I going to justify spending money on a real Chanel with all the suffering that there is in the world."

It's a hilarious line, intentionally so. But I know people who actually think like that - for real. Well, one person at least (and she's Spanish too). imagine living your entire life with that kind of anxiety. Obviously, you can't GO to the movies. That would mean spending a shocking amount of money for something that you've already paid for, if you own a TV.

Which is why I've decided to spend the afternoon giving some serious thought to the Top Ten Superhero Films. As a pastime, it's almost guilt-free - I don't even have to hunt for a carbon-offsetting website onto which to download my guilt. If I decide I want to watch one of these movies, I can download one or walk to the local video rental place. Somehow I'll have to live with the guilt of the electricity that I use to play the DVD, or the computer I'm using to write this blog.

I mean, it's not even solar-powered. Just shocking.

Bizarro Coincidence

As I lay in hospital, as coincidence would have it, the patient who joined me in the small, immaculately clean and tidy Swiss hospital ward, was from Mexico.

An Olympic standard beach volleyball player, poor girl, she'd broken her wrist. Not skiing, either, but falling off a bar stool or something.

So, out of all the Mexicans in the valley, we ended up in adjacent hospital beds. Klutzes or what?

We started to chat. The young woman's mind was, not surprisingly, turning to thoughts of a post-volleyball career. I asked her what she'd studied and where. Personnel administration, at the UNAM. Well then, I offered, maybe you've read my grandfather's book. He's Agustin Reyes Ponce.

And that was the strangest part of all. That two crumbly-boned Mexicans should meet at the base of a wintry ski slope, I buy. That one should be in awe of the other for being an Olympic athlete...okay. That the other should be silenced in respectful memory of a deceased guru of the Mexican business schools, was taking it all too far.

How big is this world, anyway?