But I’ve had some interesting experiences, and learned a thing or two about how to seduce an audience. (I come to these events with two agendas: what can I learn about this author and this book? And what tips can I take away for my own appearances at literary functions?)

The Festival brings in some cracking chairmen. Journalist, Ruth Wishart is one of my favourites and she’s a whizz at getting the best out of authors whilst bringing her own style of wit and banter to the event. She was chairing for Lionel Shriver this time, so I knew we were in safe hands.

Lionel Shriver. Hmm. In the flesh, and talking about her personal experience of losing a dear friend to cancer, she seemed somehow more fragile and vulnerable than I imagined from her writing. And she spent a fair bit of time assuring everyone that her latest book, So Much for That, dealing with disease and death, is ‘fun’, and that her unlikable characters are ‘fun’, and that spending her working life writing about objectionable people is ‘fun’. Methinks the lady doth protest too much. ‘Fun’ certainly isn’t the word that I’d apply to her books myself.

Nevertheless, I loved We Need to Talk about Kevin; dark, macabre even, but brilliantly conceived and executed. It’s written in the form of letters from Eva to her husband, Franklin, about their teenage son, Kevin, who has committed a series of gruesome murders. She’s a wonderfully flawed character, and positively ruthless in exposing her own doubts and failings. Her musings explore the origins of evil, the responsibility of parenthood, and the old nurture-nature debate. And then there’s the brilliant twist to the tale at the end – sent shivers up my spine. A clever book, both gripping and thought-provoking, and a very worthy prizewinner. It launched Shriver’s career.

But before I went to hear her I decided to read something else she’d written: Double Fault. What a disappointment. In fact, it fell squarely into the category of ‘a real slog’; only my obsessive tendencies made me persist with it. It’s a story about a young couple whose lives are ruled by tennis, and the effect of success and failure on their characters and relationships. Admittedly, I was starting it on a train with a little girl sitting beside me playing an electronic game with the sound up. (Sigh. Yes, in the Quiet Zone. Where else? Don’t get me going on that subject. But the kiddie had just hopped off the lap of her disabled mother slumped in her wheelchair in the space opposite. Only a heart of stone would have deprived that little soul of a few hours of innocent pleasure.) But I duly gave Double Fault a fairer crack of the whip by reading more on the return journey with fingers in my ears, and then at home in the absolute silence of my study. It didn’t improve.

But it got me thinking. Very few authors can be brilliant all of the time; or appeal to all readers all of the time. How much does a reader persevere once he/she becomes uninspired? Do I give people a second … or third … or more chance? Well, in my case I guess it varies.

I’ve read loads of Jodi Picoult’s books because she writes about ethical dilemmas: My Sister’s Keeper; Nineteen Minutes, Plain Truth, The Pact, Handle with Care, etc. My kind of subject matter. Though I do occasionally get a bit Picoulted-out, (well, her writing is rather formulaic, isn’t it?) and some books haven’t really lit my fuse, I’ve remained loyal, and even travelled to Glasgow to see this phenomenon, who produces bestsellers so prolifically, in the flesh. But then I read one of her earlier works – before she hit her stride: Songs of the Humpback Whale. It left me feeling very jaded. Another hard slog. So why do I give her another chance? Because I’ve enjoyed lots of her work, I admire what she’s trying to do in opening up important debates, and I know she’s not a one-book wonder.

Audrey Niffenegger’s another phenomenon. She’s both a visual artist and a writer – so talented you’re not sure whether to envy or dislike her on sight. She hit the headlines big time with her debut novel, The Time Traveler’s Wife … sickening, eh? But seriously, I still stand in awe of her ability to juggle all those time-frames so expertly. So I came to Her Fearful Symmetry with high expectations. Oh dear, oh dear. It’s one of the least appealing books I’ve ever read. Two dimensional, static and totally unbelievable. But in Niffenenegger’s case, I’m in no hurry to return. It feels like she’s forfeited my loyalty.

OK, I know that I, more than most, ought to be more forgiving. After all, I don’t want people to be too hasty to dismiss my work if they find one story that doesn’t appeal. Sigh. It’s all so subjective, isn’t it? But the reality is, there are just too many books out there; we can all afford to be fickle fans. Which leads me to make a confession … I’ll tell you next time.

This is the second week of the Edinburgh International Book Festival, and Charlotte Square, with its landmark marquees and wooden walkways, is positively seething with visitors paying good money to attend the hundreds of events. And yet there have been no publicity campaigns, no flyers being thrust into reluctant fists, no headlines emblazoned on the sides of buses, no billboards. Indeed, I haven’t seen a single advert for the event.

No, people just know it’s on. As soon as the box office opens they queue for hours to snap up precious tickets; they travel huge distances; they brave the inevitable rain … simply to listen to authors talking about their work. Shows are sold out – sometimes before tickets are even available to the masses. Devotees queue to buy books at full price; they earnestly discuss their favourite authors at chance meetings. Books are truly valued.

And in return, those attending get to be up close and personal with the big names. Luminaries like Alexander McCall Smith, Will Self, Philip Pullman, Simon Callow, Margaret Drabble, Iain Banks, AS Byatt … are within touching distance. They are to be seen strolling between the authors’ yurt and their venues looking to all intents and purposes like ordinary mortals; they chat amiably as they scribble personal inscriptions on fly leaves; they engage in eye contact with members of the audience whose tongues untie soon enough to ask questions.

Yes, there’s no doubt that in the capital this month the book is very much alive and well. Indeed, this particular festival is the largest celebration of the written word in the world!  And thanks to my Edinburgh publisher, two of my books are there on the shelves in the famous tented bookshop. How privileged am I?

More about specifics next week, when the frenzy dies down and we go back to our ordinary personae.

The emotions are still powerful years after the actual transplant, and some of the donors as well as the recipients weep as they talk. I feel immensely privileged to be trusted with their stories. But I’m also awed by their generosity. Every single one of them so far has been a busy person, involved in all sorts of activities and campaigns, and yet they find space for someone like me.

But they (as in inventors of aphorisms) do say, if you want a job done, give it to a busy person, don’t they? And that’s certainly my experience. Every time I write a book I send it out to various experts to check its accuracy and authenticity; and ‘household-names’ provide endorsements. It’s rare for anyone I approach to refuse no matter how famous and busy they are. Best-selling authors, celebrities and peers of the realm, as well as full time policemen, journalists and medical consultants – they’ve all been incredibly generous with their time. I salute them all.

Speaking of busy … Edinburgh is absolutely heaving with folk at the moment. It’s Festival time. Buses take ages to creep along Princes Street, tourists crowd the pavements blocking routes, thespians and artists of every hue vie for one’s attention. Ordinary life is hampered at every turn.

But metamorphose into a festival-goer, and everything changes! It’s an exciting place to be. I’m slotting in events here and there in between doubling as a waiter/cook in a charity café run by our church this week. (Will my feet ever be the same again?) We’re collecting for Village Water Zambia this time. The very idea of relying on scoop holes in the ground for all your water, the disease, the infection … makes you shudder just thinking about it.

The monologue: An Evening with Dementia, I told you about was superb. Poignant as well as humorous. So much truth conveyed so artistically. It certainly rang true for me.
- Yes, people do use unspecific phrases and words to cover holes in their memory. (My mother can still dredge up an occasional bright smile and ‘Hello, dear’. Chance visitors tell us encouragingly, ‘Oh, she knew me instantly.’ But we, the family, know better than to confuse a reflex cover-all reaction with genuine understanding.)
- Yes, there is a fine dividing line between reality and imagination. (The actor peered at us and debated with himself whether we were actually a real audience, or he was inside the virtual theatre of his mind. And I see this doubt sometimes in the eyes of a friend I spend time with.)
- Yes, we all need to be more aware of how we react and speak; people with dementia can be aware at all sorts of levels. (He summed up humbug and obfuscation from relatives and staff perfectly.)
Well worth a visit if you’re in the capital.

And I’m just back from the Book Festival listening to Candia McWilliam. She’s a novelist (she describes herself as ‘intensely Scots’) with a colourful past who’s won several awards herself and judged the Man Booker Prize. The process of judging involves reading about 120 contenders for the title at a rate of about a book a day. No wonder, you might think, that after a while she had to force her eyelids to stay open with her fingers. But this was no normal fatigue. She had developed a condition called blepharospasm, where the brain instructs the eyes to close, though the eyes themselves are working perfectly normally. By the time of the Booker Prize evening she was ‘functionally blind’. After conservative treatments failed she had surgery to insert tendons from her leg to peg her eyelids to her eyebrows. Her book, What to Look for in Winter is both a literal and metaphorical journey through not only physical blindness but also the experiences of alcoholism and betrayal of her second husband.

I didn’t dare ask a question, though I was wanting to. It was stressful enough watching others silenced by a quelling one-liner! Unusual in the Book Festival where authors tend to bend over backwards to make what they can out of any question that comes their way – even the ones about inspiration and technical process and why-did-you-write-this-book that they’ve answered a thousand times before. Not this lady!

But that aside, tonight it was a particular treat to just sit still with nothing more demanding to do than listen. My joints and legs have unilaterally decided that the sedentary life of a writer is a doddle compared to the life of a waiter. Well, it’s a different kind of busy. And I’m certainly not complaining. What’s a measly week on my feet all day compared with a lifetime of feeding your children contaminated water from a scoophole?

As you know, I do a fair amount of travelling by train. I usually book my tickets well in advance and make sure I get a seat in the Quiet Zone. Quiet? You have to be joking. Excited hen parties, rowdy football supporters, high decibel families, school parties, even a garrulous bag lady who travels for the company … I’ve encountered them all. None of them seemed to think it at all incongruous to park themselves alongside silent others and totally disrupt their peace. Indeed more than once, when anyone has suggested they hush-up a bit, I’ve actually heard them defend their absolute right to take over the carriage: ‘It only means no mobile phones.’ The subtext: ‘Get a life’.

But this week my travelling experience reached new heights of absurdity. In eleven hours of travelling – all of it in the so-called Quiet Zone: shrieked exchanges, raucous laughter, blaring music, computer games sound effects, excitable stream-of-consciousness conversation in assorted foreign languages … need I go on? All-in-all the cacophony of a rebellious teenagers’ unsupervised party.

Thank goodness I had something fascinating to read. During the week I’d started Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo with a view to taking it as my diversion. There’s been such a lot of hype about this trilogy, and Larsson’s posthumous fame, that I wanted to see if it really was worth all the fuss (Sceptic being my middle name). Well, it has its faults (and there were far too many characters to hold in my shrinking mind) but after the dull start I got involved with the weirdo female protagonist and devious plotting sufficiently to have to read on. Result? I finished it long before I got anywhere near the train.

But after that I needed something completely different. Ahah! Time for Self-Made Man. The story of Norah Vincent’s experiment: a year disguised as a man. Otherwise called ‘field reporting from Planet Guy’. Wow! Hat’s off to her sheer bravery and brass neck. This is social research of a different order. She was ‘a mirror and a window and a prism all at the same time.’ As Ned, she infiltrated a men’s bowling club as well as a monastery and encouraged the men to share private thoughts and intimate experiences, (can you imagine how they reacted when she disclosed her true identity?); she visited strip bars (actively participating!); and she even infiltrated an exclusively male therapy group (very nearly her personal undoing). The ethics of such deceit aside, this account of her experiences is extremely readable and thought-provoking: a sharp eye for detail combined with bracingly honest self-evaluation, alongside a penetratingly frank analysis. And at the end of it all she debunks the notion of men’s privilege and power, and concludes that she is ‘fortunate, proud, free and glad in every way to be a woman.’

Well maybe, but I confess I wished I’d had a more male attitude to saying – shouting even – exactly what I thought, without apology or qualification, during those horrendously noisy journeys on Saturday. Instead I uttered not so much as a squeak of protest. The self-made man would have disowned me!

It was originally built in 1725. And as ever, I stood lost in wonder at the vision and skill of architects who could create such loveliness. But I also went back in my imagination to the scenes created by contemporary authors 300 years ago.

We’re talking about the time of Queen Anne (her name always conjures up the nonsense poem I learned at school about Sir Smasham-up! Remember?
A chair-allow me, sir!…Great Scott!
That was a nasty smash! Eh, what?
Oh, not at all: the chair was old -
Queen Anne, or so we have been told.
We’ve got at least a dozen more:
Just leave the pieces on the floor.)
I digress. The time of Queen Anne and the first two King Georges. The age of enlightenment and reason.

With books increasingly easy to make and buy – as you sense in the library at Mellerstain too, with its hundreds of ancient tomes protected by grilles. Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Swift … it was their era.

But most especially I could easily picture Jane Austen’s immortal heroes and heroines mincing and languishing in the rooms and gardens of Mellerstain. (OK, OK, I know she wasn’t born until the last quarter of the eighteenth century, but she fits with the period of architecture, so allow me a little bit of latitude.)

I envisaged demure maidens in want of a husband, playing the spinet, embroidering the samplers and bed curtains, gazing along the immaculate garden to the folly, engineering chance encounters under parasols with eligible young men in the shrubbery.

There was even the lake for Mr Darcy to cool his ardour in – although he’d have been draped in duckweed if he’d come up out of these waters!

For a few hours it was easy to forget the hustle and bustle of twenty first century life, all the problems of an economic recession, and just enter that romantic age.

Romantic? Hello? As it says in the one rudimentary washroom at Mellerstain, complete with portable baths: it was unusual to find a bathroom in houses of the period. I shudder to think of the reality. But that’s the power of good fiction.

A perfect combination then: an afternoon dreaming amidst grandeur and history, reliving some of my favourite novels; an evening in all the luxury and convenience of the present day – my own modest home! My equilibrium was restored.

Being within hailing distance of everything, we natives can get a bit blasé about events that other folk travel half way round the world to attend, but this year I booked a few performances early on to make sure I didn’t backslide. As you might expect it’s the Book Festival that gets the bulk of my patronage and I’ve learned to be quick off the starting blocks for the ones I really really want. Only one disappointment: Hilary Mantel of 2010 Man-Booker fame has withdrawn. Hope she’s not ill again.

On the theatre front, no prizes for guessing why I’ve elected to go to a one-man play, An Evening with Dementia. Intriguing. It’ll be interesting to see how this ex-RSC actor combines humour with sensitivity in such a delicate area – an abiding concern of mine while writing Remember Remember.

And when it comes to lectures, I’ve plumped for a one-off: Why a scientist believes in God. I got advance warning of that one because the lecturer is actually someone I know. With that topic in my mind I just had to get stuck into The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief, which I read between trips to hospital (ferrying and visiting, I hasten to add, not being ill myself). The author is Dr Francis Collins, a prominent American geneticist, and head of the now famous Human Genome Project, so someone who commands huge respect from a scientific point of view. From a religious angle he appealed to me too – going from agnostic through atheist to ‘a believer who stands in awe of the almost unimaginable intelligence and creative genius of God’. Wow! How come?

It’s a very clearly laid out book – lots of headings and numbered options and arguments and counter arguments. All very orderly as befits an evidence-based scientist. Nor does he shirk the less hard-nosed tricky questions and thorny issues – the harm done in the name of religion; the dangers of a God-of-the-gaps theory; the relative merits of different possibilities – young earth creationism, intelligent design, theistic evolution …

One straight read isn’t enough for my little grey cells; I’ll need to study it slowly to have any chance of assimilating his arguments properly and deciding how far I go with his reasoning. But it certainly underlined for me my own limited knowledge of science, and the truth of that proverb: ‘It is not good to have zeal without knowledge.’ [Proverbs 19:2]

After all that brain-bombardment and challenge I slunk into the garden for a little light relief. But the questions continued.

The poppies are spectacular right now. How did we get such a huge range and diversity? ‘Creative genius’ rang in my head. Could it all be slow evolution? Is it the direct hands-on work of God? Or is it a combination? At least I know better than to talk loosely and superficially about ‘intelligent design’ now! And just wallowing in that glorious profusion of colour, and admiring the intricacy of each flower, lifted my spirits. I guess for me, none of it makes sense without God. We shall see what that lecturer says on 18 August.

Oh, before I forget, all you book bloggers out there, there’s to be another meet-up of like-minded souls on Saturday September 25th in Oxford. If you’re interested and want to be kept informed, contact simondavidthomas@yahoo.co.uk. Merely contacting him doesn’t commit you to anything.

But he doesn’t wallow in self-pity for his bit-part in this play. No, he recommends becoming a positive deviant. You can read about his five positive suggestions for making a worthy difference in Better. They can challenge everyone, not just doctors. I was reading his book on a train at the weekend and I even applied his ideas to my attitude to fellow-travellers.

One of the five suggestions is Ask an unscripted question. That took my thoughts winging back to a TV documentary I saw on 13 July: Between Life and Death. Severely injured in a motorbike accident, 43 year old Richard Rudd is lying immobile in a hospital bed, wired and tubed, comatose and totally dependent. The family know his clear, recently-expressed wish was, in these precise circumstances, to be allowed to die. They’re ready to have the machines switched off.

But then … someone observes that Richard can move his eyes in response to a question. They check. They check again. It’s a consistent response. Evidence that he can now hear. He can understand. He can communicate. But he still can’t do anything else. Nor is there any prospect of recovery.

It falls to the professor heading the medical team to ask the unscripted question: ‘Do you want us to continue with your treatment? If you do, move your eyes to the left. If you don’t, move them to the right.’ After a few seconds of heart-stopping suspense, the eyes shift to the left. At the time I didn’t know whether to feel elated or deflated.

What does this say about the place of advanced directives or instructions to next-of-kin? I’ve documented mine. I’ve signed papers on behalf of my mother, too. Are these wishes null and void? I’ve given it a lot of thought since that programme, and the newspaper articles that followed it. And I’ve concluded that no, in my case, my documented wishes emphatically stand. If I ever get to a stage where all I can move are my eyes, that is not the real me. Please ignore any contradictory instruction I may appear to give in such a circumstance. Better still, don’t ask the question!

I’m with Richard’s mother: ‘You wouldn’t be human if you didn’t wonder if he wouldn’t have been better off dead.’ For myself, I don’t wonder. I know. I don’t fear being dead; I do fear the process of dying. There, my hand is declared. And that’s despite a sobering personal experience I had when my first child was three weeks old.

He collapsed at home and was rushed to hospital, moribund. The paediatrician said there was no possibility of his survival. But two days later he was still alive. Now the consultant said there was no possibility that he would be either mentally or physically normal. He showed me the test results; I knew he was right. I still remember earnestly praying that if this was the case my little boy would just die with dignity now. He didn’t. With or without dignity.

Back then parents weren’t consulted. Just as well really, because if I’d had my way our family would have missed out on thirty nine years of a wonderful son, brother, husband, father, who is perfectly normal in every way – oh, except that he has chosen tax as his career. You have to have a kink somewhere to do that, don’t you? But he would definitely, emphatically, indisputably not be better off dead. If I were ever in danger of acquiring an inflated sense of my own importance, this experience of my fallibility alone would reduce me to size.

But hold your horses … that doesn’t give anyone permission to override my documented instructions! I may be infinitely small in the big scheme of things but I can still make my own big decisions, thank you very much.

But growing up 500 miles away I had no knowledge of either the books or the author in my youth. Shame! Shame! I hear you cry. Quite rightly. Time then to rectify this disgraceful hole in my education.

I made my first stab a couple of years ago. A good friend lent me his copy of Sunset Song, the first of the famous A Scots Quair trilogy. It took me a while to get into it, but you know me and my obsessions, I persisted – didn’t want to lose favour with the said good friend anyway – and eventually I got the hang of the language and style and enjoyed it.

This week I returned for more, but I confess it was initially in a spirit more of ‘I ought to’ rather than ‘I want to’. So it was an exhilarating feeling to find myself this time instantly into the lilting language LGG uses to evoke the ‘swing of the horses at the plough, the rhythm of the wind upon the woods, the surge of the tumbling land where the mountains run down to the sea, “the speak” of the men who toiled and loved and quarrelled …’ as his friend and critic, Ivor Brown, puts it. Absolutely! Fabulous writing. Not only amazingly poetic but also so evocative of the hard life lived between the Grampians and the North Sea in the granite towns and peaty crofts in days of old. I loved it. So I guess you could say, I finally ‘got’ what all the fuss was about!

Amongst other things LGG uses marvellously onomatopoeic words to capture bird calls, and it’s in this second book, Cloud Howe, that I found the phrase, ‘a starlings’ murmur’ meaning ‘a drowsy cheep on the edges of dawn’, which reminded me of one of my own current preoccupations. As you know, I’ve been wakened at an unseemly hour for some weeks now, by the phenomenal dawn chorus. Astonishing really, given that it’s dark for such a short time here in Scotland in the summer. You’d think the wee creatures would be too exhausted to bother to lift their heads out of their feather and down duvets.

But lying there listening … and wondering … I started to invent appropriate collective nouns for these noisy neighbours (a writer’s equivalent of counting sheep). And that led me to look up such names – authenticated ones. I’m going to share a few of the best with you:

Dissimulation of birds (small)
Building of rooks
Charm of goldfinches
Exaltation of larks
Murder of ravens
Skein of ducks (flying); raft of ducks (swimming)
Parliament of owls
Murmuration of starlings
Siege of bitterns
Ostentation of peacocks
Scold of jays
Covert of coots

Fantastic, aren’t they? But then, words are.

I told her I devoutly hoped her magic was well embedded in the griddle because this particular culinary delight was not in my normal repertoire … well, it wasn’t then. But with a precious gift like this it feels incumbent on me to keep my side of the contract, so I’ve had a couple of stabs and been agreeably surprised by the results (although DJ says they’re definitely more anaemic than they should be). I guess it’ll take a bit of tweaking to get the balance of heat and time and consistency exactly right.

But in the process of all this beating and turning and tasting it occurred to me that authors bequeath us something of their skills and magic all the time, don’t they? Whenever we devour their goodies we can taste and analyse and mimic and learn from them even without knowing them personally; no special permission required.

I was reading a marvellous novel by Jeffery Eugenides at the time. Middlesex tells the story of Calliope Stephanides who is an hermaphrodite (intersex is the preferred term nowadays), and starts with: ‘I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974.’ Brilliant hook. A curiously topical choice of reading as it turned out, given this week’s verdict on the gender tests for the South African athlete, Caster Semenya.

When I was a midwife (about a hundred years ago) I delivered babies with ambiguous genitalia and agonised with the parents. What’s the first question everyone asks? Is it a boy or a girl? Imagine having to say, We don’t know. But as far as I’m aware, I’ve never encountered anyone with both male and female organs. And I knew precious little about the condition before I read this book.

Middlesex (neat title, eh?) explores the genetics, psychology, physiology, relationships, exploitation … oh, and so much more, in a wonderfully entertaining but thought-provoking tale. It deservedly won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize, in my opinion. I was gripped, but I also learned so much along the way. And Eugenides did all the slog, all the research, all the experimenting, so I can have it handed to me on a gold-rimmed platter. How generous is that?

[Photo by D'Arcy Norman from Flickr used under Creative Commons]

Stats don’t help. Did you know that over 130,000 new titles were published last year in the UK alone? Hard to picture that number, isn’t it? Of course, set against calamities like the current serious repercussions from the budget, and more deaths in Afghanistan, and England’s comprehensive trouncing by the Germans, this news is small fry, but for a writer it’s a significant statistic. How is anyone going to notice my little books in that avalanche?

So it was especially gratifying to learn that Waterstone’s in Princes Street made a bit of a feature of Remember Remember on one of their internal displays – of their own volition, I might add; no financial incentive from the publisher. I didn’t actually see it but someone in the book business told me about it. I’m not too proud to have sneaked in specially to stand and stare, (and taken a snapshot for you,) had I known, but by the time my spies reported, the store had moved on to their next feature.

It’s a funny old career, mine. And as Andrew Rosenbeim, Editor of The Author (the official journal of The Society of Authors) says: ‘Trying to make a living by writing … requires a skill set that isn’t gifted on birth, a persistence that would deter most, and a commitment which, oddly (considering that writing is about communication) is almost impossible to convey.’

The advice generally handed out for nothing: Don’t give up the day job! Having already given mine up a few years ago, I need to periodically review progress and weigh up options. Hence this week’s naval gazing.

Oh, I nearly forgot … I learned this week (from Amanda Ross writing in The Sunday Telegraph) that some publishers and editors pay to get their books onto lists – yes, as in greasing palms with real filthy lucre. And there was I taking the statistics re bestsellers on trust! I’m sure there’s a moral lurking there somewhere.