Will I get cancelled for my French accent?
Also, you-know-who has arrived, the best-dressed Royal at Ascot, a wonderful book and something mad about parking apps
I wrote about my new book last week and I’m doing the same this week, sorry. But in the weeks leading up to a new book coming out one is consumed with anxiety about publication day and the moment that you’ve spent the previous however many years working towards (Donna Tartt takes 10 years a book and I’ve written 6 in 6 years. Each to their own, Donna.)
I find the promotion a bitttttt uncomfortable and have previously drawn an unlikely and ambitious comparison to artists who destroyed their work. Take Monet, for example, who knifed one series of waterlilies because he didn’t think they were good enough. I feel a bit like Monet atm. I loved writing the novel, and spending time in Provence for ‘research purposes’, but telling people to actually read it now it’s finished? Urgh. Makes me nervous.
I spent much of last week in a Farringdon studio, where I was recording the audio version of The Right Place. I’ve done the audio versions of all my books. I like doing it, and I think it makes sense that the writer reads their own work because they know how the words and sentences are meant to sound together. Although it’s pretty tiring. The average person speaks 16,000 words a day, but I had to record around 35,000 a day to get through it. By around 5pm, my voice was strained, my throat thick and I kept fluffing really quite easy words like ‘the’ and ‘and’. Some people are brilliant at them. Lesley Manville did the first Thursday Murder Club and I’ve read the subsequent ones with her voices in my head. Or David Sedaris. He does all his books which means the wry tone is perfect.
I wish Lesley (or David) had done mine because they’d have been wayyyyyyy better at the accents. ‘I thought you weren’t going to do another book with accents?’ my pal Cara said a few weeks ago, when I murmured my worries about reading this book aloud. I had a Qatari sheikh in my first book and I was quite nervous about doing a Qatari sheikh accent because, well, putting on accents can land you in hot water these days, can’t they? My new book is set in the South of France, so there are a dozen or so French characters, plus a romantic lead who’s American, and I failed to think all this through while writing it. What on earth was I going to do? Should I do the French voices with a light French lilt, or should I go the full ‘Allo, ‘Allo?
Friends told me to get some voice coaching and I ignored them. I approached the recording studio with trepidation as a result, and decided, in the end, just to go for it. My books are supposed to be funny, so does it matter if they’re laughing at my abysmal accents rather than my actual jokes? There’s a French notaire called Georges who sounds like a French Disney character (‘Mais non, madame!’, ‘Mais oui, madame!’), a French hotel manager called Audrey who sounds alarmingly like Manuel, and a romantic hero from Hollywood called Gray who, in one chapter sounds like he comes from New Jersey, and in the next he’s suddenly Texan.
There’s supposed to be a romantic scene at one stage where he and another character lie on the sunbeds at night, staring at the stars, but it’s going to be entirely ruined by the fact that the American hero cannot say ‘London’ in a convincing accent. Go on, try and say London in an American accent (if you’re not American). Why is it so hard? In another scene, though, he and she are talking about the Resistance in that part of France and he IS quite good at saying ‘Nazis’ in an American accent. So swings and roundabouts.
It’ll be a laugh for anyone who downloads it when it comes out in six weeks, anyway. Can you be cancelled for dodgy French and American accents or is it only other accents that people get upset about?
Picture of the week
I had so many good intentions. I was going to be as strict as Miss Trunchbull. Or if not quite as strict as her then not far off. I wasn’t going to use a silly dog voice or spoil him with too many toys or treats. I was going to put him in his crate in the kitchen at night, settle him down, and then try and ignore the crying. He absolutely was NOT coming into my bed.
I’ve had Dennis for two days and haven’t done any of the above. I left him in the kitchen for less than two minutes on his first night before buckling and bringing him into a crate in my bedroom; I have given him a stuffed pig, a stuffed fox, a stuffed sheep, a toy racoon with a crackly tail, a yak’s cheese chew, half an antler, several balls, multiple treats and I seem to be constantly talking in the high-pitched voice of a cartoon chipmunk. But he’s here, which is very lovely, and as you can see he’s already proving an excellent writing companion. Although I keep worrying that I must be very boring for him after he’s been scurrying around with his siblings for 10 weeks. Does everyone think this at the start or am I just being particularly neurotic?
Runner-up pictures of the week
Oh hello, Zara Tindall. I wrote a Telegraph column discussing the controversy surrounding Ascot dress codes a couple of weeks ago, and the grumbling from some quarters that it’s becoming a mess and nobody’s quite sure what to wear anymore. This clearly didn’t apply to Zara who looked sen-sayyyyy-tional every day that she went last week. I was going to say has she got a new stylist but it turns out she hasn’t and she’s been working with a woman called Annie Miall for ages. Also, it’s such an annoying and patronising thing to say about someone, as if they couldn’t possibly pick something out themselves. Anyway, I just think she looked *chef’s kiss*
Recommendations of the week
I don’t want to be the kind of a-hole who says ‘I picked this book up while I was in Brooklyn’, but, a couple of months ago, I picked this book up while I was in Brooklyn. Can’t remember why. Maybe just because I liked the cover? It sat on my bedside table until last week when I picked it up, and was instantly drawn into the tragicomic story of an elderly man looking after his wife, Barbara, as he struggles to deal with making their coffee, making their breakfast, making, well, really any sort of food. Walter Schmidt can’t do the laundry. He doesn’t understand how to use a computer. It’s surreal in some ways, with one main part of the plot left deliberately unexplained so you have to make your own conclusion about it, but it’s also enormously moving and very funny. I forgot where I was and laughed quite loudly several times while reading it on the Tube last week. I think reading can be quite competitive these days - “have you read such-and-such yet? Oh you MUST it’s so brilliant.” Or “have you read so-and-so’s latest? Oh you MUST it’s sensational.” How lovely to discover a writer purely by chance (did I mention I picked it up in a bookstore in Brooklyn?), rather than because it’s the latest novel everyone’s posting on Instagram. I liked it a lot.
Second recommendation: the James Blunt documentary on Netflix, James Blunt: One Brit Wonder. I was given a sneak peak of this a few months ago by a friend who produced it, and rewatched it with Mum over the weekend. It’s really, really great. I think I mentioned here a few weeks ago that I burned a James Blunt CD for a boyfriend years ago when his first album was taking off, and the boyfriend wasn’t as impressed as I’d hoped he would be. Not cool to like James Blunt, is it? He’s a posh boy with a reedy voice etc etc. Except this documentary proves that thing about he who laughs last. Because what does James do when he’s belittled and laughed at and becomes essentially a national joke? It’s hinted here that he struggled with the attacks, but then he decides to laugh at it, ridiculing those who are trying to ridicule him on Twitter.
I’ve written before about my admiration for people who can retain their sense of humour at life’s more challenging moments. I often think of the lady at the Marsden hospital a few months ago who came up to the cafe to get a restorative coffee while her husband was having treatment downstairs and I’ve ALMOST certainly told you this but I’m going to tell you again: I apologised to her for the coffee machine, which was being especially difficult that day. ‘I’m so sorry, it’s being very slow and dribbly today,’ I said, whereupon she fixed me with a knowing look and said ‘if it’s slow and dribbly, it could be prostate.’ We laughed a lot at that.
I’m not saying anything about James Blunt’s prostate. Just that his documentary is a reminder of the importance of maintaining a sense of humour even when something doesn’t feel very funny.
Nonsense of the week
This is quite niche but has anyone used the RingGo parking app recently in a place where you don’t say how long you’re going to park for? You don’t get to choose an hour or two hours or whatever you need. The bastard app simply starts timing you and you’re supposed to remember to turn it off again when you get back into the car EXCEPT YOU NEVER DO, DO YOU? SO YOU’RE THEN CHARGED FOR A WHOLE DAY’S PARKING. This happened to me last week. I had a glamorous dermatology appointment at St George’s in Tooting to check a mole (phwoarrrr), and parked in a hurry because I was running late from the gym. I parked, ran into the hospital, up and down 372 corridors trying to find the right clinic, saw a nice doctor who had to put up with me peeling back my disgusting, damp sports bra (‘Madam, this is not a mole. This is something called a seborrheic keratosis. Would you like a leaflet?’)
I obviously then came out of London’s biggest hospital on the wrong side, couldn’t remember where I’d parked my car and, by the time I found it circa 15 minutes later, completely forgot to go back into the app and turn the parking timer off, thereby getting charged for the whole day. Thanks so much, Wandsworth Council, you gits. I reckon I will vote for anyone who promises to sort out parking apps, so you don’t spend half an hour standing under a lamppost trying to work out whether it’s RingGo or Justpark or some other app you haven’t even downloaded. Gits.
Do people say Bonjour to you everywhere you go when you’re wearing that top? I would HAVE to. Surely a great way to pick up men?! 😎
Oh Dennis! ❤️❤️❤️❤️ He looks delicious.