New Hero

I'm not the most experienced writer in the world (nominations for 'Understatement of the Week' to be in no later than Friday, please) but with a grand total of...er... 2 books under my belt I can just about confidently say that writing the last bit is the easiest, the best, the most exhilarating part of the whole process. I love it. By that stage I feel like I'm there, that I am the heroine; passionately in love with my man, full of despair and desperation at the thought of not having him, so haunted by his face, his voice, his hands (especially his hands...) that the words just pour out onto the screen. (And, best of all, I start genuinely feeling like I'm fifteen years younger and two stone lighter.)

The bad thing about finishing a book is that once the champagne bottle is empty, the cake is finished and the exhilaration has worn off, there remains the small issue of starting another one. (Book, alas, not cake.) Now, call me old fashioned but I'm a bit of a one-man woman, and once I've bonded with my hero I'm really reluctant to leave him and move on-- so far (that would be both times, then) I've been certain that I'm not going to find another man I can love half as much as the one I've just left.

And in that situation, what's needed is a lot of tireless, painstaking research.

Fortunately this time my selfless labours have been amply rewarded in the shape of lovely actor James D'Arcy. Oh yes. He's been around a while, appearing in quite a lot of weird, scary-type things that even I, an ardent disciple of his melancholy beauty, couldn't be persuaded to sit through (The Exorcist: The Beginning is one) but the pictures below are taken from the TV series P.O.W. in which he starred as a shot-down WW2 airman and had lots of opportunity to look gloriously brooding and dark. Sometimes in uniform.

The series went out a couple of years ago and was pretty much panned by critics for its historical inaccuracies.

Luckily my hormones have no respect whatsover for historical fact. I'm just looking forward about spending the next couple of months gazing at him, and thinking up new ways to make him suffer, because in this book the hero is going to have it reeeally tough. This is good news because torment is a look that I think James D'Arcy does very nicely indeed.

In other news: with just two weeks to go before Amanda Ashby leaves for New Zealand, she, Annie, Penny Jordan and I got together this weekend for final farewell. Aside from a difficult moment when Amanda said she 'didn't get' James D'Arcy's sex appeal, we had a wonderful time, and I like to think that by the time she left I'd won her round (the witholding of profiteroles and champagne until she'd kissed his photograph may have helped focus her thoughts on this) As it was our last chance to change her mind about going, Annie went for the old 'bribery by chocolate pudding' trick, supplying not one but two of the most incredibly dark and calorific indulgences ever, while my daughters attempted to hide Amanda's children up trees in the garden just as she was about to leave. But sadly, it seems her mind is made up.

I'm going to miss her.

(She'll probably be coming back for the kids quite soon, though... )