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A Great Scene for My Novel Happens in 45 Minutes?

I wonder whether today might be an occasion I could use in my novel — pubs should be doing well out of this great weather and the World Cup. 45 minutes to go until England play Germany — that would be a great event to have Kim reflect on English attitudes to the Germans. What would she make of the papers or the massive build up to what’s just a second round game — and exiting it would mean a pretty disastrous World Cup for either side.

I’ve been e-mailing my German friends in the build up — wishing Germany luck but not as much luck as for England. I’m also wearing my new England away strip (the red one) that I’ve worn quite incongruously to a couple of classes at City. I turned up after watching England v Slovenia on Wednesday in the Freemason’s Arms, Covent Garden (where the rules of football were first written down). I was about 6 pints worse for wear and that might have been why my reading rehearsal was rather slow.

I’m also really pushed for time with the end of the month coming up — notably our reading night on Wednesday. I’ve made things worse for myself by volunteering to create a website for the evening — something that took me most of yesterday to do.

Lots of things I need to blog about but haven’t done so far and may not do until the end of the week:

  • A bit of agent reaction to the first few pages of The Angel
  • The antidotes I’ve experienced to the angst that has featured in a few recent posts
  • A write up of Penny Rudge’s visit from a couple of weeks ago (we’ve exchanged a few comments via Facebook in the meantime)
  • The experience of using this blog as the basis for my end of term commentary assignment
  • And much more…

Watch this space…but now it’s time for the football. Come on England — and we’re owed something special from The Big Man and Fat Frank.

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Masterchef

It’s Masterchef final day and I watched it after Manchester United’s referee-induced ten man capitulation to Bayern Munich — which might bring a smile to Kim’s face but not mine (btw she supports Chelsea).

I watch the programme occasionally with a morbid fascination — partly due to the stilted formulaic presentation where Greg Wallace and John Torode always have to shout at each other about one finalist. The other reason is to why these mad people actually want to be chefs. One of the finalists is a paediatrician who, no doubt, earns a six figure salary from working about three and a half hours per week, twenty weeks a year for the NHS while running a private practice at £1,000 an hour. However, it’s good that there are crazy people like for whom food is a passion as that’s what James is going to have a go doing at The Angel so they’ll make his decision — to invest his redundancy in a pub — quite credible. (In fact, he’ll tell Kim that he’s been a failed contestant on a programme like Masterchef — and he won’t be lying.)

Yet all these people maintain they have a passion for doing a job that is inherently financially unstable, involves very anti-social hours and requires high levels of skill for little guaranteed financial reward. I’ve always thought these people must be barking mad.

Compare them with those who would-be novelists — the people who expend huge amounts of effort sitting in front of a computer screen on their own, investing time, most of which involves anti-social working, in something that may never be seen by more than a handful of people — even if it defies the odds and is published.

Makes you wonder who’s really the most crazy doesn’t it?