The PR who made me feel like a museum exhibit

The PR glanced at my scribble-filled notebook and did an astonished double take. “You write shorthand?” she gasped. “Wow. You’re the first journalist in ten years I’ve seen do that.”

Her words made me feel like a museum exhibit from a bygone age. But then again, shorthand is one of the most useful skills I’ve ever learned. Before I started as a trainee reporter on a small weekly paper on the edge of Dartmoor I spent eight weeks in a shabby Plymouth Portakabin mastering the rudiments of a shorthand called Teeline. Our teacher was the delightful Ella, who must have been in her sixties and thought Teeline was the bees-knees. Only when I’d got up to a decent speed did my editor send me out to cover the local magistrate’s court, industrial tribunals and the thing I dreaded more than anything, the district council’s planning committee meeting.

Even now I use my 100 words per minute shorthand every day. It's a bit scrappy these days, with the odd word written in longhand, but when it comes to tight deadlines and interviewing people on the phone, a notebook and pen are still the best tools for the job. Far easier and far speedier than laboriously transcribing from a tape recorder. And there are still places where you can’t use a recorder, like courts for a start.

Shorthand seems to be a dying art so I was delighted to see it in the headlines this week. Why? Because a diary kept by First World War veteran Edward Sigrist has just been discovered in his family’s attic. It’s written in an obsolete form of shorthand and gives a vivid account of the dangers and discomforts of life on the front line.

Like most journalists I’ve hung on to most of my old notebooks. They’re stacked up all over the place in my office – but somehow I don’t think historians of the future will be poring over them.

Friday book review - A Midsummer Tights Dream by Louise Rennison

Once described as “Enid Blyton meets Cosmo Girl,” Louise Rennison’s books are hilarious romps for teenage girls who love sparkly nail varnish, Topshop and boys.

With their fluorescent covers and wacky titles, Rennison’s stories are snapped up in their millions by fans around the world. Her last novel, Withering Tights, won the 2011 Roald Dahl Funny Prize, set up by writer Michael Rosen to celebrate books that make children laugh.

Withering Tights was the first of a trilogy about an irrepressible teenage heroine called Tallulah Casey, who enrols at Dother Hall, a performing arts college in the wilds of Yorkshire, only to discover that she can’t actually act or sing. Oh, and at first glance there don’t seem to be any boys around either.

Now the second in the series, A Midsummer Tights Dream, is out and it’s just as crazy (and strewn with exclamation marks!!!) as the first. After a barnstorming performance as a comic Heathcliff earned Tallulah a place at Dother Hall for another term, she’s determined to throw herself into the experience with gusto. The trouble is that she's worried about her gangly legs and her cousin Georgia’s “scoring system for snogging” and her feelings for local bad boy Cain Hinchcliff and whether she’ll ever “climb the ladder of showbiz.” And if all that isn’t enough, it suddenly transpires out that the future of Dother Hall hang in the balance.

Warm-hearted, with snappy dialogue and a clutch of laugh-out-loud jokes, girls aged 12 and over will love it. 

A Midsummer Tights Dream by Louise Rennison (HarperCollins, £10.99)

Hotel review - The Hoxton, London

In my days as an on-the-road reporter I used to stay in hotels quite a lot. Now my hotel stays are as rare as my trips to the gym. But this week I hotfooted it to east London to spend two days with my daughter. After scouring scores of websites we eventually plumped to check into The Hoxton in Great Eastern Street. As well as being just round the corner from Spitalfields, Columbia Road and all the places we wanted to visit, it looked good value and good fun.

And so it proved. The Hoxton, which opened in 2006, focuses on the things customers really care about. The room prices are cheaper the further in advance you book and every so often there’s an online £1 a room sale. Instead of leaving endless reams of literature in your room, they give you the basics about room service and the flat screen TV on postcards labelled the “really boring stuff.” 

Rates for the night include free WiFi (no annoying codes), tea bags, bottles of water, milk, copy of The Guardian and a Pret breakfast of orange juice, banana and granola delivered to your door in a paper carrier bag. Oh, and there’s a corkscrew so you can bring your own bottle of wine and actually open it. The twin room we stayed in was small (with an en suite shower room) but the beds were super comfortable, with fine cotton sheets and duck down duvets.

The best bit was sitting by an enormous open fire on the ground floor, lounging back on a massive leather Chesterfield with the morning papers and a skinny latte. The only drawback was that it was all so comfy that at 11.30am we had to pull ourselves together and actually go out and do something.

When we got back to the hotel that night we were so exhausted that we couldn’t summon up the energy to eat in the hotel restaurant, the Hoxton Grill – all exposed brickwork, huge wooden tables and chic lamps. So we ordered a bowl of chestnut hummus (delicious) and some flatbread, poured ourselves a glass of Pinot Grigio each and settled down in front of the BAFTAs. Bliss.

The flower market at Columbia Road

The flower market in London’s Columbia Road has been on my “must visit” list for years. Every Sunday the narrow street in the heart of the East End is filled with stalls selling everything from hyacinths to narcissi to ten-foot banana trees. I knew it would be exactly my sort of thing.

Reading Joanna Trollope’s Daughters-in-Law a couple of weeks back reminded me it was high time I got my act together and went. In the book, graphic designer Luke lives in a flat “at the very top of a tall and elaborate brick building in Arnold Circus, a stone's throw… from Columbia Road flower market, from Brick Lane, from – oh my God – Hoxton.”

So this weekend, with my husband in the Far East and my son whizzing down an Italian mountainside on a snowboard (scary), I reckoned I had the perfect opportunity. Luckily my student daughter lives just round the corner and she sweetly agreed to come with me. Actually, her favourite clubs, bars and “the best bagel shop in the world” are in that neck of the woods so she didn’t take much persuading.

Sure enough, Columbia Road is everything it’s cracked up to be. Open from eight am till “three-ish” every Sunday, the place is alive with stallholders yelling “three bunches for ten pounds,” shoppers of all ages clutching flowers wrapped in brown paper and 20-somethings dressed in tweedy, old-fashioned outfits that look straight out of a Dickens novel.

Along with the flower stalls, the Columbia Road shops (open on Sundays) are pretty top-notch too. Between the pair of us we bought cards from Ryantown (artist Rob Ryan’s shop), homemade cakes from a delightfully-named bakery and gift shop called Treacle and two gold buttons from Beyond Fabrics for my daughter’s coat.

From there it was just a brisk walk (it was blooming cold) round to Brick Lane. Famed for its curry houses and vintage shops, the place was as busy as Oxford Street in the pre-Christmas rush. Street artists sat sketching, visitors queued up to buy curries and bagles (tucking in appreciatively as they walked down the street) and old and young alike played chess and a game called Carrom (apparently a cross between draughts and billiards) at outdoor board tables. Hmmm. Curry, flowers and board games – what better way to spend a Sunday afternoon?

Images: Columbia Road (top), Arnold Circus (above)

Parking and coffee - the French way

I thought I was clued up about France, but thanks to Michael Wright and his brilliant C’est la folio column in the Daily Telegraph I’ve just discovered something new.

Apparently, if you invite French guests to dinner they will always turn their car around when they arrive, ready for a neat, speedy getaway at the end of the evening.

It’s a brilliant idea – and one my mother took up years ago. She got so fed up with the embarrassment of doing a complicated 36-point turn as her hosts watched that she hit on the idea of always parking her car with the bonnet facing in the direction of home.

I started copying her example after I had lunch with friends in Northamptonshire. They had a very narrow driveway and as I reversed gingerly out, I suddenly saw that their smiles and waves had turned to frantic gestures and looks of horror. But too late. I backed straight into a bollard on the pavement in front of their very eyes, destroying my bumper and most of the bollard in the process...

PS. Michael Wright also pointed out that nobody in France puts milk in their coffee. It just isn’t done. In fact if you even dare to order a café crème after midday in France you’ll get a withering look. It must be a petit café or an espresso. Nothing else will do. In similar vein, if you ask for a “well done” steak you’ll get very short shrift. I once asked for my steak to be “bien cuit” in a chic brasserie in Paris (above). The waiter looked surprised and seconds later the chef, in his cooking whites, stormed out of the kitchen and shouted his head off at me for daring to ask for such a thing. “Not in my restaurant,” he yelled at the top of his voice.

Amanda Hocking and Kerry Wilkinson - self publishers extraordinaire

Self publishing used to be the Cinderella of the book industry. Critics looked down their noses at self-published books and assumed self publishing (or “vanity publishing,” as it was snootily called) was the desperate last resort of writers who’d failed to find a mainstream publisher for their work.

But how things have changed. It recently emerged that US author Amanda Hocking makes more than £1 million a year from her self-published books. Readers, it seems, can’t get enough of her paranormal fiction and she’s selling more than 100,000 e-books a month.

On this side of the Atlantic, the latest success story is Kerry Wilkinson, a Lancashire sports journalist who’s sold more than 250,000 copies of his crime thrillers. Instead of hawking his first novel, Locked In, round the nation’s publishing houses, he decided to self publish it as an e-book - at 98p a copy. Even though he didn’t have an agent or publicist to help him, he soon realised he was on to a winner. Locked In and its two follow-ups, Vigilante and The Woman in Black, sold so well that he was declared the bestselling e-book author at Amazon’s UK Kindle store for the last quarter of 2011.

But despite sales that many better-known writers would give their eye teeth for, Kerry still sounds delightfully down-to-earth. “I’ve only ever tried to do my own thing,” he told the Daily Telegraph last week. “I wrote a book I thought I would like and enjoyed doing it enough to write follow-ups. I had no expectations for it and so this has all been terrific.”

Now other writers are fast getting in on the act. Not only that, I’ve met several authors recently who are self publishing out of print titles. Actually, I reckon I’m missing a trick. I’m definitely going to look at self publishing my first two novels, Hard Copy and Moving On (above), very soon. Watch this space.

PS. When I switched on Radio 4 soon after 7am this morning I expected the news to be full of the NHS reforms, Syria and Greece. But instead, Whitney Houston's gorgeous I Will Always Love You was playing. It seemed slightly odd - and then I realised it could only mean one thing. Such sad, sad news.