Dutch courage.

I bet I’m not the only one. You’ve known a word for longer than you can remember. You’ve not taken that much notice of it. It’s always been just a word to you. And then one day you come across it and you have to stop to think about it. For whatever reason. It has a quirky quality, a hitherto unrealised appeal, that makes it stand out. Tomorrow it’ll probably seem like just another word. That new found novelty will have expired, like a New Year’s resolution gym membership. Bosom. It just sounds so…odd to me tonight.

Why am I thinking about bosoms? Because I’m back in the bosom of my Turkish family after a break back in the UK. Romney Marsh to be precise.

I had a very enjoyable, if cold, stay. Thanks to all involved in that. (The stay not the temperature.) I got my bike ride out to St Rumwold’s church in glorious winter sunshine. That south-facing bench I was looking forward to occupying? There was only another cyclist sitting on it with a thermos of coffee when I arrived. Pissed me off a bit. By the time I’d had a tour of the graveyard and the inside of the church they’d gone. But the graveyard tour while I was waiting turned up a couple of interesting discoveries that I had no idea about. I think they call it serendipity.

That’s my bike.

Speaks for itself.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Vaizey,_Baron_Vaizey

Look him up on Wikipedia.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Hughes_(novelist)

Fame by association.

And some views from that bench. (Sort of.)

I signed the visitors’ book. And then I signed it as David Booker. And then I signed it as Jo cash. (Anyone else remember the anxiety I was feeling a few weeks ago over a schizophrenic episode on the way to work?) Was that wrong? It didn’t feel wrong. (It could be argued that they are me and I am them. [That kind of logic should have gone down well with Him].) Anyway, I wasn’t hit by lightning. Maybe He just wasn’t looking.

A few hundred yards up the road and I was at The White Horse in Bilsington for a couple of pints of real ale and a very nice meal in front of an open fire. It was worth the trip for that. I’m talking about the four hour flight back to blighty.

Then I went back outside into a blast of freezing fresh air for the bike ride home. That felt like being hit by lightning. Actually it felt worse. He works in mysterious ways.

There are a few things that I go back to the UK for in particular. One of them is the opportunity to add to my TBR pile with cheap books ferreted out from the local charity shops. Plenty to be getting on with. And because I was travelling alone my suitcase space on this occasion wasn’t commandeered by a higher authority to be filled with…crap.

And they’re just the paperbacks. There were just as many hardbacks but I can’t read those. They go into special boxes for when I have a home library or a book-themed coffee shop with lockable glass fronts on the bookshelves.

I was so glad that I took my laptop. I couldn’t seem to shake off Istanbul time in my body clock and I was regularly wide-awake by five in the morning. So I was able to chip away at Particular Stupidities (R&M#5). I think I’ve broken the back of it. I think I know how it’s going to end. And I think I know how I’m going to get there. That is a great feeling when you write a police procedural book like what I do – no plan, no idea, no experience of police procedure.

So, about DI Romney getting his leg over, again. In Rope Enough (R&M #1) I wrote the only sex scene I’ve ever written in nine books. It wasn’t exactly Fifty Shades of Grey. But it was still sex. Those that mentioned it wished that it hadn’t been included. I think they found it gratuitous. I wrote it because it seemed the right thing to do at the time. I think that I’ve made it more right over time by pointedly not allowing Romney to have sex since. I’m not in the mood to explain that. And now he’s going to have sex again.

I got to that point in the story at about two o’clock in the afternoon one rainy Dymchurch day. And I realised that I needed a drink before I could even think about it. That bottle of plonk was the only booze in the house. It certainly did the trick. By three o’clock Romney was lying back on his sweat soaked sheets staring at the cracks in his ceiling. And I was pissed.

Dutch courage.

I’ve had a few comments on He Made Me (B&C#2) and they’re all positive. That’s great news. Obviously.