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Dame Jacqueline Wilson’s children’s book My Sister Jodie is apparently having an ‘offensive’ term removed from all future editions, on the basis of one person’s complaint to a supermarket. ONE. One person, who overrules the author, the editor, the multiple people who will have already discussed whether that word can be included before publication of a book that’s sold 28,000 copies in Asda alone, prior to that ONE complaint. What an excellent lesson to teach young readers on the logic and fairness of the adult world.

The term in question can be amended to ‘twit’ with the adjustment of a single letter, so no prizes for figuring it out. I wouldn’t want to repeat it here, naturally, what with it being so very filthy - though I’m amused that the two are supposedly interchangeable. Roald Dahl’s The Twits has taken on a whole new meaning - a book which, incidentally contains worm-eating, the cruel misuse of superglue, and ‘bare bottoms winking in the sun’, a phrase which has stayed with me across decades.  Won’t somebody think of the children?

I happen to think swearing is both big and clever - when you do it right. There’s a single magnificent use of the ‘c’ word in Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (crossover, true, but absolutely something I’d give to a bright 10-year-old) which made the book for me.  Christopher’s Asperger’s syndrome denies him emotional articulacy, but the casually brutal adults around him have no such excuse: it’s a powerful moment, cementing our sympathy and understanding of his actually very reasonable incomprehension of our world. Wilson puts ‘tw*t’ (honestly, how hilarious does that look?) into the mouth of an unpleasant, unempathetic antagonist. Humbert Humbert’s a great big perv.  Raskolnikov kills.  It’s called characterisation. Or is children’s literature not allowed to have that particular grown-up toy?

  Holiday = books!  Oh, I’ve missed you.  Selected to be as unrelated to Girl Meets Cake as possible, and thus the fabulously eclectic mix of Silence by Josie Henley-Einion (debut literary thriller from a dear old mate, and a cracking read: pacy page-turner, challenging erotica, and above all a truly compelling character study of one woman searching for a coherent social, racial, gendered identity across decades), Death and the Penguin by Andrey Kurkov (recommended by M the Wonderagent with typical wisdom: dark, funny, gorgeously economical prose, killer ending, and A PENGUIN), and Italo Calvino’s The Castle of Crossed Destinies (your common-or-garden Calvino mindmelt: a musing on the nature of stories, and storytellers, beautiful and strange).

  Girl Meets Cake might currently be titled Woman Meets Caffeine.  I look forward to the forthcoming Writer Meets Deadline more than you can possibly know.

  Trucking around Pompeii in the blazing sunshine; discovering my niece has proven her super-brainiac status for good; becoming an auntie x 6 (Writer Meets Nephew next week!); realising that solo holidays are only fun until you’ve found a snack product with the face of Rolf Harris, and you have no one with whom to share him.

Best way to start one’s week: on a train to Balamory Tenby, implausibly picturesque jewel of the Pembrokeshire coast. I last hit West Wales on a post-A Levels holiday, to enjoy those final bits of intimacy with school friends before we all buggered off to university (we went to a very classy nightclub in Saundersfoot, and got chatted up by a bloke who claimed he was Griff Rhys Jones’s nephew: such are pulling techniques of the Welsh schoolboy), but generally when I head for the homeland I get stuck at Cardiff. Which is lovely, of course, but provides fewer opportunities for building sandcastles.

Pembrokeshire has so many castles of the non-sandy variety they have no truck with Stonehenge-esque fencing, and are quite content for you to meander all over them. Carew is good: Manorbier even better (not least because their costumed mannequins are Madame Tussaud’s cast-offs: marvel at medieval J.R. Ewing! fling rotten tomatoes at Brezhnev in the stocks!). Highlight of the holiday, however, was the company. Apparently, you can hire a paparazzo to follow you around all day to make you feel like a star. I recommend obtaining a small niece instead, who will be similarly mesmerised by your every nose-blowingly mundane act (Auntie Susie has socks on! Auntie Susie has muesli! Auntie Susie HAS EYES!). Comes with free hugs. Sometimes the hugs include jam. Could anyone ask for more?

From Head To Toe, Eric Carle; Cockatoos, Quentin Blake; Kipper, Mick Inkpen. Two-year-olds have all the best books.

I need to get better at writing on trains. Curse you, iPod, distractor of the masses! Although should you find yourself on a 5 hour train journey that has just become a 7 hour train journey thanks to a 4-minute delay making you miss your connection - just to pluck an example from thin air, natch - you could always pass the time listening to me (and other more amusing people) blethering away about narrative point of view, Sex & the City, and chocolate plungers on last week’s Litopia podcast (iTunes or streaming). Otherwise, I’ve been contemplating Chekhov’s Gun (not to be confused with Chekov’s Gun). I suspect I’ve got an entire armoury strapped to the wall in the opening chapter of Biscuits & Lies: might need to discard a crossbow or two…

Being entertained by The Last Shadow Puppets (they sound like The Walker Brothers channelling Viv Stanshall: basically Gretschen Hofner with a bigger production budget, which can only be a good thing); watching M*A*S*H (the Henry/Trapper/Frank Burns era: oh Radar, I do love you so); being hugely impressed as usual by the ginormous brain of Alex von Tunzelmann, whose Indian Summer makes even a kidlit junkie like me get excited about grown-up non-fiction; eating magnificent fish & chips from Ficci’s in Tenby, who have been frying since 1935 - accept no substitutes!