Meeting Hanif Kureishi

A funny thing happened on the way to this blog… no, honestly. Last night I met Hanif Kureishi – a very pleasant bloke, devoid of ego and pretension, also a very funny writer. (see en.wikipedia.org/hanifkureishi)I asked him, as you do, what advice he would give to writers wanting to get published. “Start a blog”, he said. So first thing this morning, and I mean first thing – 6.45 am – I’m on the computer trying to find out how. And I’m not getting anywhere.
The slowness of computers
I’m logging on to the internet and it is taking an unconscionable time. The little thing in the corner of my screen that looks like a cloud in a washing machine, is going round and round. It can’t be my daughter on MSN, or my son on Youtube – not at this hour. I go downstairs and find that my husband is downloading stuff on bit-torrent. No problem, I know how to stop it without f***ing the whole thing up. Except that I don’t. As I gaze at the buttons I find that suddenly none of them make any sense.
Reasons to divorce
My husband is asleep and gets very cranky if he wakes up too early, even with coffee to sweeten the deal, so I can’t ask – but I’ve got a pretty good idea of what’s happened. He’s set the default language to Romanian. Every so often he does this – I don’t know why. Once I couldn’t operate our mobile for weeks because he’d set it to Latin – and I couldn’t reset it to English because I couldn’t understand the Latin controls…you get the picture. My husband is the sort of person who thinks that everyone can understand Latin if they just “think about it”. We are celebrating our 15th wedding anniversary next month – a tribute to my enduring tolerance, I think you’ll agree.
First post
So here’s my first post – a little earlier than Royal Mail gets their arse in gear these days. I’m sure it’ll be the first of many – happy reading!
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