Libby Garnett was sending me enthusiastic plans for advance publicity for the launch of Dark, Passionate Earth, which was a novelty, because normally I’d be chasing her up by this stage. In the past my books hadn’t so much been launched as dropped into a backwater and left to drift downstream as the current took them, like discarded Pooh-sticks.

But now, suddenly, Dark, Passionate Earth was to have a tube poster, supermarket promotion, shop-window displays in Piccadilly … I think it was Piccadilly … the works. I’d believe it all when I saw it.

I’d started to check my Amazon rankings hourly when I was home. Did I require compulsive behaviour therapy?

The Women For Intellectual Advancement had invited me to take part in a march for peace through Shrimphaven on the next Sunday and, even more strangely, we had all been asked to wear something sparkly and will be divided up into sections colour-wise for the march itself: doctors, teachers, housewives, intellectuals, etc., etc.

My invitation said to wear something sparkly and pink, which I assumed was for all the writers until I phoned Ramona Gullet and discovered her invite said lilac, so God knows which bit they’ve put me into, probably at the back in Miscellaneous or Morons.

Ramona said she never wears lilac – it makes her look the same colour as a frog – and she didn’t possess anything sparkly and clearly she was not a glittery sort of person. I said the only sparkly outfit I had was a hand-beaded skirt and top, which I was not going to waste on a WFIA march, and if we were both in the writers section, why did I have to wear girly pink?

She said God knows, and did I intend going? And I said of course not, because although of course I supported peace I didn’t think that marching about being spangly was going to help attain it one little bit, especially somewhere like Shrimphaven where publicity would be nil – and in any case, would I want to appear on the news as a glittery pink-clad brunette like an ethnic-nod Barbie?

Then I said I’d see her at the next Affiliated Authors meeting in London on ‘How to Promote Yourself in the Media’, and told her about the Wryhove Festival. It turned out that she was going too, but only for the last day to do a workshop on Crime, with a reading for the stronger-stomached punters.

The first of Sergei’s memoir extracts was out! It was all about his boyhood in Russia, with only occasional flashes of what was to come, to tantalize the readers into expecting something terribly revealing in the later instalments, but it was like Billy Elliot Goes Ural so far.