I'm writing again.  I'm not sure how this happened.  It wasn't planned.  

I finished what is essentially the first complete draft of The Difficult Novel in May.  Since then I've been doing all those things a self-published author has to do but actually doesn't want to.  I've proofed, reformatted, promoted and published all summer long.  I've brought out new paperback editions, I've redone old editions and improved them.  I've worked and worked and worked and worked for what has basically amounted to no reward at all.  

The summer got hotter and hotter and drier and drier.  My financial situation got worse and worse, seriously not helped by my council tax bill suddenly doubling and my rent increasing massively for the second time in a year.  I've developed a weird twitch in my right cheek and a health concern that has involved ghastly scans and tests and a mention of the C-word.  My stress levels have become so high that even the trace of caffeine in tea is too much.  I've had to reduce the amount of chocolate I eat (and chocolate is my ONLY vice) and cut out coffee all together (tragic). 

And then, just when I thought summer had finally ended and a breath of autumn was imminent, a freaky September heatwave hit and London died its last breath in temperatures hitting 35C.  Everything was too difficult.  My job.  My life.  Responsibilities.  Failures.  Getting up in the morning.  Trying to sleep.  Trying to find joy when there wasn't any to be found.  No relief, no release.  No money to even catch a train to get out of London for a day.  All the hard work I had done for months on end seemed suddenly quite pointless.  Why reproof, reformat, republish novels that no one would ever read.  Why was I doing everything wrong and why didn't I know the right way after all this time.  

I virtually had a nervous breakdown.  Everything made me cry.  I thought about suicide but honestly, I couldn't be bothered to go that far and there is that teeny tiny part of me that still, pathetically, goes on hoping.  Despite everything to the contrary, I never stop hoping.  And anyway, the suffering it would cause my daughter would just be appalling.  She might not like me much half the time but she still needs me.  And I need my life.  I don't want to have to start again.  I've got novels to write even if no one reads them.

And then one day, in the middle of that heatwave, I sat down at the kitchen table and I began to write.  Without notes, without a plan, barely without a title.  I wrote by hand which I haven't done, erm, ever.  Not since I was about twelve.  I always type my stories, progressing from an ancient typewriter to an electric one to various computers over the years.  Handwritten?  Never.  Without a plan?  Never.  Without notes?  Never.  Seriously:  HANDWRITTEN???  

I can't begin to tell you how well it's going!

Time to come clean:  I listen to the Archers.  I wish I didn't because it's mostly quite boring. I also I wish I wasn't quite so easily manipulated by the emotions it generates, but then that's the art of storytelling, whether you write weird Sci-Fi novels that no one reads or radio soaps.  

Knowing that the trial would take all week, I decided not to listen each evening, when the radio is on vaguely in the background while I eat dinner.  I figured - rightly - that it would be hugely stressful to drag out the trial all week and would listen to it in one go while I did the ironing on Sunday morning.  Which I did, having to step back at one point because I was so blinded by tears.  It was terrible listening.  It was heartbreaking and maddening - heartbreaking because you feel every ounce of pain that Helen has been through and maddening because you hate Rob violently, knowing he will never get his comeuppance.  Why am I listening to this bloody stuff, I asked myself at one point.  It's so cruel, so unbearable, so difficult to distance oneself from - but that, of course, is the reason.  You can't distance yourself because you are emotionally involved.  You listen because you care about the characters.  

I haven't always been an Archers' fan.  When I first began listening to Radio 4, I used to leap across the room to turn off the Archers when it came on because I hated the theme music. But then one Christmas, Radio 4 trailed a half hour special on New Year's day - I think it was some or other anniversary.  Was it 60 years?  Yes, it must have been because Henry was born on that day and he is now 5 and blah blah blah, dear me, yes, I know it too well.  So the first episode I listened to had Nigel falling off a roof that was at least 20 stories high because, golly, he screamed for a long time!  It took me YEARS to work out who everyone was and there are still characters I don't know.  There is a lot of history I don't know either.  But worse, sometimes the women's voices sound the same (the posh ones) and I can't quite work out who's talking.  But it doesn't matter.  It's vaguely pleasant and interesting, quite often stupid and irritating (I do really wish the ghastly Pip had buggered off to Brazil and stayed there) - but then you get the occasional brilliant storyline, like Rob/Helen one, and it's worth it.  I feel rather sorry for the actor who plays Rob because he himself is being regarded as the villain - which just goes to show how good he is.  Let's not forget that he was acting a character that was acting breaking down in tears while on the stand.  And he was convincing.  What makes him so scary is that he has a wonderful, rich, warm, seductive voice on radio - it's utterly feasibly that sensitive Helen would have fallen for him.  And utterly feasible that he turned out to be so viciously cruel.

Quite a lot of the time I wish Helen had managed to kill Rob quite completely dead because this story is not going to go away.  I wasn't planning to listen to the hour long episode last night as I was quite shattered after the omnibus.  That was really intense, my daughter said, coming in when it was done.  I'd had the radio so loud half the neighbours were probably listening avidly too.  And while I didn't listen to most of the irritating argumentative jurors' story, I was in the bath when the verdict came in.  Much splashy clapping with joy - and then more tears that were lost in the bath.  The relief was immense.  I think if the verdict had gone the other way, I might have stopped listening forever.  There is only so much pain that a radio audience can take.

The picture, by the way, is the one used on the Ambridge Synthetics Twitter account.

September first was, apparently, the meteorological start to the autumn.  All the dead leaves on the ground seem to confirm this - except they aren't autumn leaves.  Plane trees drop their leaves when they're dying of thirst and the only reason that they are so dehydrated is because it doesn't rain much in London.  I'm not entirely sure how London gets its reputation for rain.  The one or two days it might rain must be the only days that anyone judging the weather would actually be in London.  Or perhaps they're on the outskirts of London.  Or perhaps it was just cloudy.  It's often cloudy.  It's more often humid, which is utterly unbearable when you factor in the phenomenal pollution puked out by car exhausts.  I defy you to stand next to a bus on a busy road and not feel as if you are going to die in the next second from the fumes and the horrendous heat emanating from its arse-end.
The lack of rain seems to delight weather forecasters.  Rain is always seen in a negative light. "Pleasant" days are the ones where it hits 30 degrees C in London and the humidity is somewhere way above 60%.  "Pleasant" is when the street garbage stinks so much you have to hold your breath half the time.  And then hold your breath again when a bus goes by in case you pass out from the carbon emissions.  "Pleasant" is when the sidewalks are sticky with dog pee, pub puke, fast food discards, spit and split garbage bags.  Oh, but don't garbage bags go into, you know, big bin things?  You'd think so.  This is Bloomsbury, the very centre of London, relatively up-and-coming what with the Eurostar around the corner, the smart British Library, the immensely popular British Museum, the chi-chi Brunswick Centre – yet I walk past garbage bags (split and stinking on the sidewalk) every single day.  
The only thing that clears the London air and cleans the foul sidewalks is rain.  And not that pathetic sticky shit, full of soot and sweat and poison, that dabs at the sidewalk and makes it feel slimy.  Proper rain.  The stuff that makes you really wet if you forget your umbrella.  The stuff that makes the trees go WOOHOO and stretch out their branches with relief and feel their cramped, dried out roots unfurl in soil that has solidified into rock.  The stuff that, apparently, people hate.
Yes, I know it can rain too much.  There are bits of Britain that seem to wash away at the first sign of a cloud.  When I watch the weather forecast, there are parts that seem to rain all the time – and yet none of it ever seems to reach London.  Watch the little blue patches fizzle out when they reach the south east.  It's like there is a dome over the city.  Although perhaps there is a dome:  it’s the pollution, so thick and noxious that nothing can get through.  Except sunburn.  If I wasn't so damn poor, I would have left London years ago to go and gone to live in a rainy bit.  I just haven't decided yet if I want to be Welsh or Scottish.  Yorkshire appeals too.  Where are the really pretty rainy bits?  Do I need to drive a car to get about?
I am, I think, about the only person I know that actually likes rain.  I loved spring this year when, for once, it rained properly for the first time in several years.  We had no rain at all last year and summer seemed to last from March to October.  Even Christmas day was warmer than Easter this year.  And yet so many people say what a bad summer it was because it rained so much.  REALLY????  Where do they live?  Can I go there?  All those people who hate rain:  please, come and live in London.  It stinks in the summer and is full of some really awful people and the pollution will kill you if a terrorist doesn't, but, hey, it doesn't rain, so that makes it “pleasant.”
I was delighted to hear John Humphries last week grumble about the lack of rain.  He mentioned it again in his occasional Waitrose Weekend column.  I'm not entirely sure where he lives but he wanted rain for his garden.  As the years go by, I like him more and more.  I think he should grumble more often on the Today programme.  At least he's honest.  The first half of the summer I've had to pretend endlessly to idiot people who kept saying what a bad summer we were having.  The fact that the air was fresher than it had been for years, that the sidewalks were cleaner than they had ever been, that foul specimens of humanity had chosen to stay under their rocks seemed to be lost on them.  Everywhere I go people want the sun to shine non-stop, full-on 35 degrees C.  They should all bugger off to South Africa.  Like John Humphries, who apparently spent some time on the Highveld in South Africa, I also experienced its  dry dry dry dry dry heat.  It never bloody rained.  The skies were a washed out blue ALL the time.  We hated it.  Everyone hated it.  Everyone hated being hot and no, we didn't have a swimming pool.  It's some kind of fallacy that if you were white South African, you had a pool in your luxurious back yard.  I can’t even swim!
I came to England to escape the heat.  I came to London for the rain.  But I was lied to.  There isn't any.  August is invariably the worst month when the spring rains (if there was any) has long since dried up and the humidity hits soul-crushing levels on a daily basis.  Now that it’s September, you’d think all this humid stuff would have be washed away on an autumnal shower.  Heh.  It’s stickier today than ever with no relief in sight.  Over the weekend, the weather forecasters went on and on and on about how Saturday was an awful day but Sunday was so much better.  On Saturday, it rained for twenty minutes (stickily), blew a breeze and managed to be quite a pleasant, tolerable afternoon with a tinge of freshness in the air.  Sunday the humidity reached new heights of horribleness and a thick layer of cloud held in the pollution all day like a lid.  But because it didn’t RAIN that made it the better day.  I’ve heard that the Met Office has lost their BBC contract.  About time the BBC lost their weathermen.  Or retrained them.
“In the south east today we have the odd spot of rain which will make things feel deliciously fresh.  All that horrible humidity will be blown away by this nice breeze bearing down from the north pole.  It’ll be freezing cold at night so you’ll be able to sleep well and drink hot chocolate and feel much better about life in general when you wake up the next morning.  The temperatures won’t go much above 18 degrees C for the forty seven years so everyone will be in a better mood and all road rage will cease to exist and all those tiny trees the council never waters will actually survive longer than a month.”
Roll on autumn.