The Last Post

In the bath the other night I had one of those Moments. Dunking my head under scalding-hot water, doing the skooshing-down thing, bracing my shins but letting the rest of my body be completely weightless, floating blissfuly...

[note to self: book into one of those flotation tank thingies, but remember to prepare properly beforehand]

Anyway, I had this kind of flashback to a moment in the past. A time when I was blissfully happy, excited, life was full of promise and I was in the midst of a full-on definite Adventure.

At first the flash of memory was so brief that I couldn’t pinpoint the moment in question. It was lost in a blur that lasted at least two years. But then my mind’s-eye-microfiche homed in on a precise snapshot. Me, on a beach, by the sea. In the middle of the night.

I thought, “I should write about that...

...oh, but I already have.”

It’s in The Book, you see. And that’s when I had the idea. The one that involves pretending people have asked all the questions they never did. Like, “That bit in your novel about the soil... did that ever happen?”

One of the more disappointing parts of being a novelist is that your oeuvre, the thing you set before everyone and say “This is me,” the thing that the world then adopts and publishes and accepts as a valid piece of art... is never dissected anywhere near as much as you were hopeful / fearful / terrified that it would be. People are far too polite. Oh all right then, people are just not interested.

But sod that. You’re all too bloody nice or indifferent to ask me about the strange cucumbral sex act, so I’ll pretend you’re not and answer the question anyway. And I’m also going to execute Idea Number One, which was to stop blogging.

The result? The laziest blog in the whole history of blogs e-v-e-r. Extracts of my novel, published here, chosen solely on the basis of whether they were based on real life or not. But no preambles. No explanations. And an assumption that you know this was a work of fiction, and therefore the truth may, at times, have been... embellished.

But possibly not as much as you think.