The Chipping Norton Literary Festival, James Corden and bike helmets

A dynamic writer friend called Emily Carlisle is one of the organisers of a brand new literary event due to launch next year. The Chipping Norton Literary Festival takes place in April 2012 and promises to be a treat, packed with writing workshops, author talks, book swaps, readings, signings and debates.

Over the weekend I’ve been helping (in a minuscule way) with the website and as I worked I got to thinking about some of the very best literary talks I've been to over the years. Two instantly came to mind. One was the late Sir John Mortimer, the beloved creator of Rumpole, who spoke at the Kings Sutton Literary Festival in 2008. I’ll never forget my teenage son’s engrossed face as Sir John regaled the audience with memories of Laurence Olivier playing his dad in A Voyage Round My Father, tales of Harold Wilson’s jollity and the fact that QCs keep their silk stockings up by wearing suspender belts designed for outsized hospital matrons.

My other favourite was hearing Martin Amis at the Oxford Literary Festival last year. He was interviewed by the poet and critic Craig Raine (who as a postgraduate student taught Amis at Oxford). I loved the way Raine dumped his bag on the floor, unravelled his scarf and then admitted cheerily to the audience that the pair had rehearsed “very little, if at all.”

But the friends’ hour-long conversation was enthralling. They covered everything from Amis’s view that for women, “having it all suddenly became doing it all” to his realisation that age is “very comic and tremendously humiliating.”

The most fascinating part of the discussion came when Amis spoke about his early novels. He said his writing style had “changed unrecognisably” and that he’d been “aghast” when he’d recently re-read three or four pages of his first novel, The Rachel Papers. “A first novel is about energy and originality,” he said, “but to me now it looks so crude. I don’t mean bad language – it’s so clumsily put together. The sense of decorum, the slowing a sentence down, the scrupulousness I feel I have acquired, aren’t there. As you get older, your craft, the knack of knowing what goes where, what goes when, is much more acute.”

I’m sure the Chipping Norton events will be just as illuminating. If you’re keen to hear the likes of Joanna Trollope, Sir Andrew Motion, Susan Hill, Jill Mansell, Katie Fforde and many more, you can sign up to the mailing list here.

PS: James Corden is one of the funniest men on the planet but my admiration for him soared today when I read an interview with him in the latest ES magazine. Asked what he would do if he was Mayor of London for the day, he replied: “Make sure that Boris bikes came with helmets. It’s terrifying that they don’t.” I’ve been thinking the same since the cycle hire scheme began. We urge everyone to wear helmets when they’re riding their own bikes, so why not when they ride Boris’s?

That John Lewis Christmas ad - and interviewing Morrissey

It seems another world now but my first job in journalism was as a reporter for a small weekly newspaper in the West Country. Golden weddings, flower shows, parish councils, you name it, the news team had to turn the comings and goings of country life into scintillating copy. Well, do our best, anyway.

After two years I escaped to London and became a feature writer on a women’s magazine. Friends assumed this would involve writing cosy stories about shopping, cooking and babies, but they couldn’t have been more wrong. The magazine was keen to attract a younger, hipper audience and I was instructed to interview as many up-and-coming rock stars as I could. While other writers rushed round the world meeting the likes of Mel Gibson and Tom Cruise, I set off in pursuit - metaphorically speaking - of stars like George Michael, Paul Weller and Morrissey.

The reason I’ve been thinking of those heady days was that Morrissey is back in the news again this week. Why? Because he has allowed John Lewis to use a cover version of Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want for their Christmas advertising campaign. One outraged fan complained: “Please, Please is our hymn about longing and unrequited love. No way on earth should it be used to sell household goods or clothes.” Incidentally, the ad, which features an angelic young boy counting the days in the run-up to Christmas, has reduced thousands of viewers to tears. For some reason, even though I cry at virtually anything, I don’t find it heart-rending in the least.

But to get back to Morrissey, my abiding memory of him is his wonderful turn of phrase. I interviewed him over lunch at J Sheekey in Covent Garden and despite his dour, tricky image, he was charm itself. He told me how his mum always believed in him (even when he decided he wasn’t cut out for work) and that as a child growing up on a Manchester council estate he far preferred staying in listening to Billy Fury records than going out to play with the other kids. And even then, he refused point-blank to settle for mediocrity.

“It sounds quite dramatic but I would never be content to straggle midstream,” he told me. “I always felt that if I couldn’t have what I wanted, I would rather have absolutely nothing at all. Perhaps that’s why I always thought that I would be impossibly successful or incredibly inconsequential.”

PS: As The X Factor gets more annoying by the week, 15 year old singer Jasmine van den Bogaerde, alias Birdy, shows the rest of them how it should be done. The great niece of actor Dirk Bogarde has just released her debut album (above) and it’s stunning. Her version of Fleet Foxes’ White Winter Hymnal sends shivers down my spine.

House With No Name Weekly Digest: From tooth fairy inflation to a new murder mystery by PD James

Every Saturday the House With No Name blog features some of the highlights of the week. The picture above, by the way, is the cover of Lauren Kate's eagerly-awaited novel, Fallen in Love, which will be published in January 2012. If the gorgeous jacket is anything to go by, her legions of fans are in for a treat.

House With No Name on tooth fairy inflation: How much does the tooth fairy pay at your house?
House With No Name on Liz Jones: Columnist is unfair to slate hard-working young women
House With No Name Education: What 21st century teaching is all about
House With No Name Book Review: PD James’s Death Comes to Pemberley
House With No Name Film Review: Page One: Inside the New York Times

PS: Twelve days into the National Blog Posting Month challenge and I’m battling on. A friend asked me why I was doing it, and for the life of me, I can’t remember!

Friday book review - Death Comes to Pemberley by PD James

Formidable – that’s the best word I can think of to describe PD James. She’s written 19 novels, created the much-loved Inspector Dalgliesh and two years ago hit the headlines when she gave BBC director general Mark Thompson a grilling about the large salaries paid to executives.

She's now 91, yet she still has the capacity to surprise her fans. Instead of producing another Dalgliesh story, her latest novel is a murder mystery set in the world of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice.

James’s new book opens in 1803, six years after Elizabeth Bennet walked down the aisle with Mr Darcy. The couple and their two young sons are happily ensconced at Pemberley, Darcy’s grand country house, and Elizabeth’s sister Jane and her husband Bingley live nearby.

But their blissful idyll is shattered the night before the Pemberley autumn ball, when a horse-drawn coach races down the drive and out tumbles Elizabeth’s drama queen younger sister Lydia. To the Darcys’ horror, she shrieks that her husband has been shot in the woods.

A plot that plunges Elizabeth and Darcy into the midst of a murder investigation might sound preposterous, but James, with her fine writing skills and expert knowledge of Jane Austen’s work, takes the challenge in her stride. The end result is a pacy detective story that displays an eagle eye for period detail (especially when it comes to 19th century forensics).

It’s fascinating to learn, for instance, that 200 years ago detectives couldn’t distinguish one person’s blood from another’s and that night-time autopsies had to be conducted by candlelight.

In her author’s note, James observes that Jane Austen avoided dwelling on “guilt and misery” in her writing and apologises for involving "her beloved Elizabeth” in a crime story.

She adds that if Jane Austen had written this book she would have done it better. I’m not so sure. Death Comes to Pemberley is an elegant and quietly compelling read.

Death Comes to Pemberley by PD James (Faber and Faber, £18.99)

Liz Jones moans about young women

Over the last few months I’ve stuck up for Liz Jones left, right and centre. I even defended her in this blog back in June, saying “...she writes so well and with such disarming frankness that her diary is a must-read.”

But this week she’s gone a step too far. Even for me. She’s hit out at a whole generation of young women, castigating them for everything from taking maternity leave to not answering their BlackBerrys when they are off sick. She compares maternity leave to a “holiday” and clearly thinks no one should ever be ill. She rounds off her Daily Mail piece by raging: “Personally, I think you should crawl to work if you have to. No wonder the number of women who are unemployed is rocketing. If ever I employ a woman again, I’ll make jolly sure she’ll have already gone through the menopause.”

Liz Jones makes her living by being outrageous, but today’s rant is ridiculous. For a start, she reckons looking after a baby is a doddle, that you stick your infant in the pram, put your feet up and watch daytime TV. As all mothers know, the first few months are wall-to-wall hard graft. I went back to work at a magazine when my daughter was nine months old – and it was easy in comparison. I did endless phone interviews, wrote a couple of articles a day and even had time for a sandwich at my desk – all impossible (maybe I was just a hopeless mother) with a young baby.

But her criticism of “the lack of work ethic in young women today” is even more bizarre. At 19, my daughter and her friends are far more industrious than my generation ever were. They juggle university studies with jobs, start their own businesses and are 100 times more capable than their parents. With the recession starting to bite and employment hard to come by, they know they’ve got it tough and have to be equipped with the skills to succeed. The last thing they need is one of the best-known columnists in the country slating them so unfairly - and with so little cause.

PS: I’ve just discovered my new favourite clothes shop – Mint Velvet. Launched by three ex-Principles employees two years ago, it now has four stand-alone stores (Marlow, Tunbridge Wells, Chichester and Windsor – they should open one up north soon) and concessions in House of Fraser stores across the country. The designs range from soft leather biker jackets, flattering trousers and chic dresses to a gorgeous grey suede cross-body bag I fell in love with. I popped into the Marlow store (above) yesterday and it’s stunning. Best of all, the assistants were helpful, charming and knowledgeable. I’ll definitely be back.

The tooth fairy - and GlossyBox

It’s a much-loved custom, passed down through the generations. When children’s baby teeth fall out they tuck them under their pillow at night, then wake in the morning to discover the tooth fairy has left some money.

How exciting, only it turns out that the tooth fairy is an awful lot more generous in some parts of the UK than in others. In London a child receives an average of £5.10 per tooth, an amazing sum that would add up to £100 for a full set of milk teeth. In Portsmouth, however, children get 10p a tooth while in Hull it’s only 5p.

In these bleak economic times it’s clear the credit crunch is hitting everything – even the tooth fairy. As Mark Pearson, chairman of MyVoucherCodes, the company behind the survey, says: “Even the tooth fairy is feeling the pinch.”

Looking back, I got off lightly in the tooth fairy stakes. I paid a Scrooge-like 50p for my daughter’s baby teeth and when it came to my son I didn’t pay a penny. Why? Because in his down-to-earth and logical way he announced at the age of five that he didn’t believe in the tooth fairy at all. “It doesn’t make any sense,” he said. “How can a fairy arrive in the middle of the night and leave money under your pillow? How do they know I’ve lost a tooth?”

He was so unconvinced by the fairytale that I didn’t even bother to argue. Except a year or so later he suddenly realised he was missing a trick and that thanks to the tooth fairy his schoolfriends were coining it in while he was getting nothing.

“You know the tooth fairy,” he said. “I’ve changed my mind. I think there's something in it after all.”

PS: I know lots of people ask for specific Christmas presents, but I prefer surprises. Which is probably why I love the idea behind the GlossyBox. The idea is that you sign up, pay £10 per month (plus £2.95 p&p) and in return get sent a chic pink and brown box (above) containing what the company describes as “five high-end luxury samples from exclusive brands.” I’ve just been sent one to try and it’s absolutely gorgeous. As it was the sixth box, it contained six items - a Dermalogica pouch with three product samples (one is a “multivitamin thermafoliant” - I don’t even understand what that is!), a pack of Robert Piguet perfume samples, Stila smudge stick waterproof eye liner (brilliant) and some Leighton Denny nail varnish (I’d describe it as pink but it’s called Babydoll and it's lovely). So if you know someone who's keen on trying new beauty products and loves surprises, it could make a great (surprise) present.