At last... Introducing Lorenzo and Sarah from Powerful Italian Penniless Housekeeper

So, the cheese and pineapple cubes were oddly satisfying. Stress-levels had reached critical point by the time I finally returned home from the supermarket with my tinned pineapple chunks and rubbery mild cheddar, but the half hour it took me to spear them with cocktail sticks was fabulously therapeutic. Am not really a fan of the cheese-and-tropical-fruit combination myself, but have to admit there's something about eating bitesized bits off a cocktail stick that makes you consume stuff you wouldn't usually bother with. Am wondering if it might be a good way to get the children to eat sprouts and Christmas pudding this year.

Anyway, pineapple and cheese on sticks don't actually feature in Powerful Italian, Penniless Housekeeper so I'd better move on and get down to business. Just to re-cap, this was the book I started writing this time last year, when I was still a bit shell-shocked from the bleakness of Tristan and Lily's story and in need of some light relief.

I can't remember when or how I first came up with the idea of a book about a thirty-ish single mother enduring the ordeal of her younger, prettier, more successful sister's wedding but I do know that, with it's slightly larger cast of characters and inherently rom-com tone, I originally thought it would make a good Modern Heat. However, after Tristan and Lily this was exactly what I wanted to write, so gave the basic premise a few significant tweaks and indulgently steamed ahead.

From the outset the book had a very different atmosphere from the ones I'd written before and to reflect this I needed a hero who was a little bit unusual, a little less hard and handsome and polished than his predecessors. If you remember I was initially thinking of casting a young and brooding Marco Pierre White in the role, but unfortunately he failed to grasp that he was merely there for visual guidance and his immensely strong character and flat Yorkshire vowels kept imposing themselves onto the character of Lorenzo to an unacceptable degree. I’m afraid in the end he had to go and Keanu Reeves, in his battered, grey-streaked and world-weary forties very admirably took his place.

Lorenzo Cavalleri is an Italian film director who, from humble beginnings, has achieved huge commercial and financial success and been married to an actress widely acknowledged as the most beautiful woman in the world. The trouble is, none of this has brought him any happiness. As the book opens he is newly divorced and getting ready for the release of his latest film - a sexed-up blockbuster about the life of sixteenth century scientist Galileo, starring his ex-wife and the pretty-boy actor with whom she had an affair during filming. It is Lorenzo’s darkest hour, and he is forced to confront the creative cost of his success. In a desperate attempt to regain some glimmer of artistic integrity and self-respect he travels to Oxfordshire to check out the locations for a project he has wanted to do for years; a film of a little known, lyrical book by a dead poet called Francis Tate.

If the book has a theme I guess it would be authenticity. Lorenzo works in an industry which is all about artifice, but he is a man who prizes authenticity above all else. When he meets Sarah he is knocked sideways by her artlessness and while she might see herself as pitifully unsophisticated, to Lorenzo she is a breath of fresh air and someone who can restore his faith in life and women as well as giving him back his creative vision.

One of the things that sets this book apart from the others is that, for me, it’s very much Sarah’s story. Usually when I start planning and writing a book the hero is the most dominant presence in it, the character that dictates the mood and the action, but I felt very much when I was writing this one that it was all about Sarah. And of course, Sarah represents all of us. I think more than any other heroine I’ve written she is the most grounded in reality and embodies the most recognisable bits of myself and my friends, which made her very easy and hugely enjoyable to write. It also made me really, really want to create a strong and worthy hero for her - a man who would understand her buried sadness and appreciate her generous, curvy beauty.

(Not much to ask, is it?)

On that wistful note I'd better go and join the queue at the post office. Back on Thursday with music and a competition question.

The temperature's rising...

Here in the UK at the moment we're enjoying a) a spell of unusually gorgeous weather, and b) a delicious daily fix of Marco Pierre White in the new series of Hell's kitchen-- two things which are entirely unrelated, but which together are combining to bring a warm glow ( internal and external) to my life. Most pleasing. As revealed last week, in the end MPW didn't make it as the face of Lorenzo, largely because he's way too distinctly the face of himself and I found it impossible to impose a different character and identity upon him. He's as mad as a bicycle, and distinctly battered-looking these days, but it's lovely to watch him being all macho and brutish and rude every night. I'm tempted to try to book a table at the restaurant just so I could gaze close-up at the larger-than-life prints on the walls of Bob Carlos Clarke's iconic photos of him from the White Heat book and shiver in the blast of his blistering fury. I'd be far too excited to eat, which, post-Easter, would only be a good thing.

Anyway, last night the contestants had to make a dish that summed up their childhood-- cue sentimental sniffles all round the TV kitchen, and much discussion on our sofa about nostalgia food. For me the most evocative food from my long lost youth would definitely be what we called 'cowboy toast'-- white bread dipped in beaten egg, fried until it's golden and fluffy (dripping with artery-clogging cholesterol) and eaten sprinkled with (more coronary-inducing) salt and tomato ketchup. This was what my lovely stepmother often made us on Sunday evenings just before we went back to my mum's house after spending the weekend at my dad's, and it brings back slightly bittersweet, melancholy feelings of things ending; of packing bags and being in transit. For Him, childhood food memories were largely of the glorious age of packaged 1970s delicacies, such as Arctic Roll and Angel Delight, and those deeply unpleasant meat pies that came in tins. No wonder he became a strict vegetarian when he was 16.

For my own daughters, their early years can be summed up by the fairy cake. We've talked about my fairy cake baking habit/obsession before, and I even helpfully/boringly supplied a recipe which will produce 18 delicate, cherry-topped offerings that can be eaten in a couple of mouthfuls. However, it hasn't escaped my notice that these modest staples of my girls' formative years are already looking frighteningly retro, and that today's fairy cakes are bigger, blowsier, and more glamorous, decadent and delicious than anything to come from my own oven so far... Take these, for example, which He and I brought home from a rare child-free day scouring the antique markets of Stafforshire/Derbyshire on Saturday. (The arm in the corner of the picture belongs to daughter #3 who was doing a wild dance of excitement at the prospect of getting her hands on the cake with the chocolate buttons on the top...) I can see I'm going to have to up my fairy cake game.

So, what foods evoke childhood for you? Are the memories happy or sad, and are they things that you still eat today? (Think I might make cowboy toast for lunch...)

I'm back... sort of....

Have been struggling to rouse myself from my easter-egg induced coma for a couple of days and get around to posting, but routine is out of the window, the computer has been hijacked by a crowd of pyjama-clad bandits with unbrushed hair and chocolate-smeared faces and somehow I lack the energy to reclaim it. Anyway, having taken one look at the chaos of scattered cereal and nutella smeared on every surface of the kitchen this morning, I've grabbed a pot of tea and my laptop and retreated to the sanctuary of my bed for a quick catch up.

So, Paris. Lovely, although it would, admittedly, have been even better if I'd brushed up beforehand on how to say 'Daughter #1's tonsils have swollen to the size of Brussels sprouts and are covered with white spots and slime.' Aside from that, the current pitiful state of the British pound made the whole thing eye-wateringly expensive (watching my husband pay almost as much for a cardboard cup of hot water and a separate tea bag for me in the Jardin des Tuileries as he had for a glass of champagne in St Pancras's glorious champagne bar was something of a low point) but the sun shone and the city was beautiful and the girls were thrilled by Notre Dame, and the Van Goghs in the Musee d'Orsay and eating at a pavement cafe after dark. I made a special pilgrimmage to stand outside The Hotel Crillon, where Orlando and Rachel didn't quite get it together, imagined Olivier striding away from the Louvre having just left La Dame de la Croix, and gazed discreetly at beautiful Parisian men (and there are many) for future inspiration. Professional to the end, that's me.

The morning after we got home I marched daughter #1 off to the doctors for antibiotics, and sent her back to bed to recuperate ahead of a long weekend of late nights and chocolate with the cousins while I drafted the other two into Operation Emergency Spring Clean. The sudden sunshine had cruelly highlighted the need for this, and rushing upstairs to make up the bed in my office-that-doubles-as-a-spare-room I was horrified to discover three mugs growing fascinating biological cultures in the manner of petrie dishes, and several landfill sites-worth of chocolate wrappers and odd bits of paper with random phrases scribbled onto them that had been left in the wake of the last deadline. Thankfully I had just unpinned the last pictures of Keanu Reeves (who, in the end, did sterling service as the face of Lorenzo Cavalleri, my Italian film director hero) was lugging the final bags of rubbish down the stairs when everyone arrived.

After that things are a haze of cake (supplied by my lovely sister in law) wine (supplied by the Sainsbury's delivery man) and chocolate (supplied by the easter bunny). At some point we turned our attention to planning this year's family Olympics . Brother #1, who is the official organiser of the games decided that, in a bid to moderate the excessive alpha-competitiveness that is rife amongst the male contingent in our family, all teams should include a junior member and the games should reflect this. This is good news. Left to themselves the men would probably opt for uber-macho events like base-jumping and tractor-mower racing, so as we watched the children playing in the garden the idea of including a hula-hoop element to the competition initially seemed cool.

Until we tried it for ourselves.

Apparently adults are utterly physically unsuited to hula-ing. Hilarious hula-hoop masterclass by the children followed (all of them maestros-- able to keep three hoops going while walking around the garden, playing catch and seemingly without moving their hips at all) but there was absolutely nothing remotely funny about waking up the next morning in such an agony of stiffness that it was almost impossible to get out of bed.

Three days later it still hurts. Any alternative suggestions to the hula-hoop event would be gratefully received.

The End!

Finally got there. And now I feel like this.

Thank you, thank you, thank you for your lovely encouragement and positive thinking. Sadly, the ancient computer in my office-in-the-attic took the role of Leo in this epic drama, and died right at the end. Thank heavens for the invention of the memory stick.

Quick update

It's all going well. I don't have as much time as I'd like (she says, slightly hysterically) but I'm actually loving writing this book, and a lot of the time this week when I've been sitting typing away at my desk it's felt a bit like this...





(Probably best not to think about what came shortly after...)