every day should be a susie day

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!

Or possibly just mumble a bit in a slightly incoherent fashion. I have the grand privilege of guesting on the Litopia After Dark podcast on Friday evening, and promise to do my level best to be thrillingly audible. (I could aim for debonair and sparkling but, you know, it’s been a long week: let’s not get ambitious.) Full details on how to listen (even for the technowary, or ‘Mum’, as I like to call her) at the above link – and do pop by the chatroom if you happen to be online at the right moment: I hear it gets quite racy in there…

I’ve gone on a deranged Dick Francis spree, and have been gobbling up the Sid Halley ones with abandon – including the fourth, Under Orders, which I thought I’d read and hadn’t (and quite want to copy-edit, as Sid should really be investigating the mysterious theft of multiple commas). I read a review somewhere that declared the charm of his affable, mild-mannered, stoic heroes is that we secretly all think we’re like that. Alarmingly correct, I fear.

See all those brackets up there? YOU HAVE NO IDEA. They’re like a plague, I tell you. As serafina67 is to CAPSLOCK, Heidi is to parenthetical asides. (I may need to get stern in the edit.)

Being overexcited about Indy 4 even though the rumour mill says turkey; being overexcited about the Dollhouse trailer even though YouTube won’t let me see the bloody thing (T, it’s the new Joss Whedon thingy); being overexcited about having a laptop that actually, you know, works; sighing at BBCW’s knicker-knotting over Doctor Who knitting patterns.