At least I am a novelist. Half the writing workshops in the country were taken by people who’d never had work published, unless by themselves, or they’d been published in a totally different field from the one they were actually teaching. Talk about the blind leading the blind. Speaking of which, that reminded me about the time I was asked to go to a centre for the visually impaired and do a talk. Well, they were almost all (a) extremely old, (b) had just had lunch, (c) were most of them deaf as posts and (d) wanted to go to sleep; so after shouting out the first paragraph I’d prepared about my novels, which seemed to send them off quite nicely, I just walked about telling funny stories to the few who were awake, and after about half an hour most of them came alive again and we had a really exciting discussion about Stephen King, whom they all adored.

But I digress … So off I went to the Whimpergreen Foundation Arts Centre with my talk all prepared – one I’d done successfully all over the place – with worksheets and discussion ideas and all the rest, and I was supposed to be met in the café beforehand and given lunch by Luella somebody – it might have been Whimpergreen. In which case clearly this was a family-funded thing, and if it was a business don’t they call that sort of thing nepotism?

She proved to be a stocky, belligerent-looking woman with little piggy eyes who met me with the accusing words: ‘So you’re the Romantic Novelist, are you?’

I said, ‘Guilty as charged,’ smiled sweetly and added, ‘But I can assure you there are more than one of us, though thank you for the compliment.’

She looked a bit gobsmacked, and so was I when I discovered I had to buy my own cafeteria-style lunch, which is not quite what I was expecting, though it was very good if pies are your forte.

Luella sat on the far side of the table with her arms crossed, studying me as if I was a low form of plant life, which was not good for the appetite.

Then to top it all, this deaf old bat sidled up, plonked her tray down next to me and started whispering on and on about some novel she’d written, and said she was sure I would want to read the synopsis and first chapters over lunch so that I could discuss it with her at the meeting.

And I said no, I’d rather just eat, and I wasn’t going to discuss individual manuscripts, but my talk was about how to write a novel that sells, which I’m sure she would find very relevant.