Snow Business

I've had a trip south and been to Bath for a few days. It's a place I've been to only briefly before and this time it was delightful. I stayed in a lovely hotel where, on Sunday night I watched Celebrity Big Brother start. (I'm loving it so far. Just to hear Stephanie Beacham going on: 'Yes, Joan and I fell off a balcony while we were fighting at the end of that season of Dynasty. I was wearing a pink suit.') The whole of Bath seemed to be bracing itself, waiting for the snow to descend. I was there to record my own first audiobook at BBC Audio - which has to be one of the friendliest and most welcoming places to work I've ever been to. I learned so much in two days, and thoroughly enjoyed the whole experience of doing my first recorded reading. (It's for my next teen novel.) I was in the green room with Nerys Hughes and Jacqueline Wilson and we were all wondering about how bad the weather was going to get, and whether everyone was ever going to get home. I'd asked J. to look up weather reports and national rail enquiries etc etc... and we gathered round my phone when he texted back - to see what the latest was. But he'd texted us a photo of the snow-panda he'd built in the front garden.

I made it home okay - by getting an earlier train, once we were finished in the studio. The journey was fine - the delays were minimal. It was quite dramatic - pelting into the rising darkness, with the snow growing thicker and wilder as we went further and further north. So relieved to be home - J. meeting me at the little station round the corner - and taking me on a kind of tour of the snowmen and sculptures that all the neighbours had been out building that day. Giant jelly babies that had been hollowed and turned into igloos; colossal snowmen and ladies in hats holding flowers. And then - home at last - and the bliss of finding the house still decked out for Christmas. Epiphany today, though!

My reading while I was away: finishing the Tom Perrotta novel for book club. Issue-heavy in a way that felt claggy and dull sometimes, but I liked it in the end, I think. Then a marvellous 'Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: the War of the Worlds' by Manly W. and Wade Wellman - father and son pasticheurs of the 70s. Titan are publishing this lovely, very nicely designed line of Holmes apocrypha. I loved this one about the Martians from Wells's book. This fragmentary novel is a lovely meshing of these different fictional worlds. I loved the use of grumpy, bigheaded Professor Challenger. He's one of my favourite characters in anything, and works so well alongside Holmes. (Does anyone know of any other good team-ups between these two know-it-alls?) So - thoroughly enjoyed this. Especially the scene where they're wrestling a martian in through the window of 221B and Holmes is stabbing it with his drug-loaded syringe. I'm not sure I liked the whole Mrs Hudson-the-sexpot subplot, but Watson's blindness to the affair was amusing. I want to read the others Titan are bringing out too, now. Will they reprint one of my all-time favourites? A book I lost many years ago: Holmes versus Fu Manchu: 'Ten Years Beyond Baker Street' by Cay Van Ash. Hope so!

The Wellman and Wellman novel was one that various people have included in lists of steampunk novels they've sent me. Remember, when I asked for steampunk suggestions, last week? Well, I got some lovely lists and ideas from people. Thanks, everyone! I'll compile them and post them here soon. It turns out I'd already read a lot of the things that people consider central to the genre - but there are things that I've clearly missed out on.

Right now though, I'm reading the seventh of the Cleo Coyle 'coffeehouse mystery' series: 'Espresso Shot.' I can't tell you how much I love this series of amateur slueth books. They're like Sex and the City meets Ed Mcbain. I'm careful to stay one behind the current book - so that I never come up to date and run out. Bravo, husband and wife team Cleo Coyle.