May 16th
I’ve been on holiday – a week in Langkawi, where dolphins frolicked in the bay, monkeys sat in the trees around the swimming pool, and a yard-long monitor lizard strolled casually across a path in front of me. The children were in heaven – actually they were mostly hurtling down a water slide – and I was hoping that inspiration for my next book would strike as I lazed. I don’t like the word inspiration. But there are points where certain ideas or images come together in the brain, and a little light bulb flashes to say that something has been achieved. Anyway, inspiration – an idea – can’t be forced, all one can do is to provide the conditions. This, I have found, often means thinking about something else, or thinking about nothing at all, and letting one’s sub-conscious do all the work. So I dutifully thought about nothing at all, fully expecting an idea to strike me by day three or four, but it seems the sub-conscious refuses to be tricked like this. My sub-conscious must have been aware that I was waiting….
Never mind, the week was not entirely unproductive. I did manage to read a book my friend Lucy Cavender had recommended to me. The Uninvited, by Yan Geling, is a novel written in English by a Chinese woman, a writer who worked as a journalist in the 1970s but who now lives in the