The train journey from Delhi to Jaipur was quite different from British rail – it left on time, tea and biscuits were served followed by breakfast.
We all lugged our cases up and down stairs refusing help from the porters and then discovered that for 40 ruppees (60p) we could have had porter service – such Scottish thrift.
Pigeon and grass for lunch today. Pigeon is good, grass is surprisingly not bad but it gets stuck in your teeth.
So far today has been translation day, and I’ve spent most of it with my head in the french-english dictionary.
Words like “outcome” and “output” have a specific meaning in development language, and it’s hard to know whether the direct equivilent has the same specific meaning in French, or whether there’s another word that’s used instead.
This Saturday I got my first taste of spruiking. I always have books to sign and sell after giving a talk, but this was different; the real hard-core ‘roll up, roll up ladies pll-llease… I have cabbages, I have cherries, I have a new biography as featured on Women’s Hour…’ in the front of a Waterstones shop in Bury St Edmunds.
I am a very nosy person. What could be a more legitimate excuse for delving into the fascinating life, letters, unpublished novels, houses, bottom drawers, last will and testament… of someone who intrigues you, than writing their biography? Aware of the potentially invasive nature of the role, I once described it as psycho-stalking, and was duly ticked off by a more established writer.
Oh dear, I have found a new way to delay doing any work… checking the online Amazon sales ranking of my biography of Eglantyne Jebb – SCF’s founder. The ranking is a kind of scary irregular pulse that tells you how any book is selling compared to all the rest in Amazon’s warehouse on an hour-by-hour basis.
After seven years of researching the life of Save the Children’s founder, my biography of Eglantyne Jebb has finally published. It’s not the same as having a child of course, nothing like, but I do feel like I am losing protective control of this long nurtured thing and sending it off out there on its independent shelf-life
