Shelfie

Many, many years ago – way back into the last century – I went to interview Quentin Blake for my student newspaper. He was great. We did the interview in his studio, which had a drawing desk complete with half-finished work at one end of the room, and a huge bookcase at the opposite end, with the top few shelves filled entirely with different editions of all his books. And I remember thinking to myself, ”I’m going to have one of those one day.”

Well, as book number seven is published this week, I’m up to two whole shelves. And ooh, it doesn’t half feel lovely.

(Footnotes: Oxford and Cambridge Anthology features a short story – very weird attempt at 21 to be Penelope Lively for some reason – by me, as well as two by someone called Zadie Smith. Martyn Gregory’s Diana the Last Days has a nice credit to “my London researchers Adam Macqueen and Bianca Roccelli” and describes us as ”Bright young things”, so you can tell how long ago that must have been published. The Popbitch book features some of my very best investigative work, including ”Which Celebrity Has The Tallest Pet?”. And Literacy In Context For GCSE was the realising of an even earlier dream, to be a school set text, in the form of an interview with Ian McKellen from The Big Issue when the first Lord of the Rings film came out. Other works: model’s own)