Tagged by Trish!

So after a miserable few months of endless rain and arctic temperatures summer has arrived without any warning, like the very worst kind of visitor, and has caught me with no wearable shoes or white bras. (I can’t actually think of any visitors who’ve ever caught out in that exact way, but you get what I mean...) It’s just as well we ventured forth to brother #3's wedding at the weekend, because that means at least I have legs that have seen a razor within living memory, and have had the edge taken off their fluorescent Celtic Whiteness with a bit of St Tropez tan, so I’m not as unprepared as I would otherwise be.

Anyway, came back from a long weekend of family gorgeousness to discover that I’ve been tagged by lovely Trish Wylie (who's currently up for a cool as anything Romantic Times Reviewer's Choice Award) for 6 Random Facts about me. It’s not too long since I did this last, so this time I'm moving away from 'random' and going specialised, and with weddings very much uppermost in my mind at the moment, I’m doing 6 wedding related thoughts.

(Photo of brother #3 and his beautiful bride pinched from the website of their fabulous and uber-cool photographer, Crash Taylor)

• Weddings are a lot like Christmas. ie. the most fun imaginable if you don’t have to organise or pay for them.
  

• After spending the budget of a developing nation on half a Wedgewood dinner service, new shoes, waterproof mascara, 3 tonnes of confetti and a night in a hotel, it would be a good idea if someone in your convoy of 4 cars were to spend an extra £2.99 on an up to date Road Map. The 2004 version is useless for negotiating the new layout of Nottingham town centre and although the bit in Four Weddings and a Funeral when they run down the street swearing is totally hilarious, in real life it’s undignified, stressful and grim....
  

• ...Until the reception, when you’re holding your first glass of champagne and realise that you’ve just provided the Wedding Anecdote that everyone will recount fondly for the next 55 years.
  

• The bit in the service about ‘with my body I thee worship’ is the part that makes all the women in the congregation well up with emotion. And all the men smirk.
  
  
• Weddings make you realise that, although your brothers are handsome, grown men with expensive cars, underneath you still see them as boys in superman pyjamas who take their dinner money to school in a purse around their necks. And you’re glad because they’ve found women who understand that too.
  

• Weddings do for love what Wimbledon fortnight does for tennis. They big it up. Suddenly you’re aware of how much you love everyone—your stepmother for being glamorous, sweet and funny, your children for not showing you up too badly and being patient in the face of being asked 427 times how old they are now, your sister-in-law for surreptitiously passing you tissues under the table when you start weeping copiously during the speeches. And your husband, for dancing all evening with every little girl under the age of ten and none of the ones over 18.

So now it's back to reality and back to work. I have just over two weeks to go until my deadline, and unless I get a move on there's absolutely no chance of my poor heroine getting a big white dress and a trip down the aisle towards her brooding Argentinean hero...

Radio Gaga and a birthday surprise...

I almost forgot! (top tip of the day: always make a note of promises you make when awash with champagne...) It's my turn to provide the present for the little pink dancing guy at the PHS! I decided to be practical-- after all, doing all that dancing, he's going to need a lot of music, so I'm sending him a pink i-pod. I'm going to download some tunes by Pink onto it too...
Happy Birthday little pink heart!

Anyway, in other news, Radio 4's programme on A Hundred Years of Mills & Boon was rather a mixed bag, which I suppose was inevitable and understandable, given that it's aim was probably to present some sort of balance. The inclusion of the finger-wagging, lemon-sucking 'Director of Women's Studies' was yawn-makingly predictable, as were her opinions of the genre. They were so astonishingly misguided that thinking about where to start answering them makes me want to lie down under the desk with a bottle of cooking sherry. Luckily Trish Wylie is made of stronger, cleverer stuff, as are Kate Walker and Natasha Oakley. Go and check out what they have to say about it!


I don't really want to dwell on the negative because there were some really good parts of the programme-- the contribution by Richmond editors Tessa Shapcott, Jo Carr and Meg Sleighthome for a start, Sharon Kendrick's robust dismissal of some tired old cliches, and some of the details about the history of the company (like the fact PG Wodehouse used to write for them!) were all great. So it's silly to get so disproportionately irritated by Celia Brayfield's (herself a writer of women's fiction) contribution which was breath-takingly spiteful to readers-- many of whom I suspect cross over between Mills & Boon and her books. Her considered opinion is that HMB books are written in 'tired' and 'hackneyed language', and that the editors have to go through manuscripts removing the cliches; 'But you can always see the holes where they've cut them out.'

Gosh.

Always, eh Celia?

She must read a lot of them to have noticed that. Which is odd considering she then went on to say that they're 'the lowest common denominator of reading, for people who can only just about read.' It makes you wonder why she wastes her oh-so-valuable time on them. And yet she must because, I mean, nobody would be stupid enough to judge and publicly denounce something they hadn't read would they?

(Celia also calls them 'mediocre'. I bet she'd give her eye teeth for some of Penny Jordan's 'mediocre' sales. 84 million books worldwide. Ouch. That must bite.)

Thankfully Fay Weldon came along just in the nick of time and hit the nail on the head (what a shame Celia Brayfield wasn't standing in the way). Her comment 'I will fight to the death for readers to read what they want' reminded me of Virginia Woolf''s argument in 'A Room of One's Own' in which she denounces exactly Celia Brayfield's obnoxious brand of literary snobbishness

This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women....
So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hours nobody can say. But to sacrifice a hair on the head of your vision, a shade of its colour, in deference to some Headmaster with a silver pot in his hand or some professor with a measuring-rod up his sleeve is the most abject treachery...

All in all the programme delivered few surprises, but there was one notable one. Julian Boon's voice. Mmmm... deep, mellow, delicious, and oddly out of place at 11.30 in the morning. I wonder if the powers that be would agree to him doing the 'Book at Bedtime' slot... reading a Mills & Boon, of course....