Here’s news: at 3 a.m., I finished the rough draft of my book, all 92,000 words of it, written in three months, with barely a day off. Well, not quite finished: I still have one chapter left to write, and it will come out of this trip I’m making with my late sister’s daughter Hannah, to Paris, where she has dreamed of visiting ever since I gave her a copy of “A Moveable Feast” three years ago, and she would lay in her bed in the country, bored and restless, and imagine that she was in St-Germain-des-Pres and the Latin Quarter. Which is why I booked us rooms in St-Germain. Off we go tomorrow.

I wish I could adequately convey how much my poor old brain hurts from all this. It feels like I’ve been back in college, during exam week, staying up late, night after night, putting the old noggin through its paces. He is a far less resilient noggin than he was back in the day, so you can well imagine how bruised he is. But, hoo-hah, I’ve written another book! When I get back, I’ll finish the final chapter, write a short introduction, and then my editor and I will have a couple of months to do revisions and polishing. Meanwhile, though, I feel as if I have bloody well earned that plate of oysters and bottle of Chablis that will be waiting for me at le week-end. Meanwhile, let’s get excited about France, shall we?