Floods and the Frontline Club

What a summer. The Pool of Unease comes out on Friday, and I’ve been doing a flurry of local radio interviews and writing about all manner of things for publicity purposes. I’ve been in England for nearly a month with all three children, and things have been a tad chaotic with me yo-yoing up and down to London, and the children in the tender care of my brave parents, who have no water because of the floods. This doesn’t sound right, of course – how can there be floods and no water? But the pumps have been deluged, and so not a drop has made it to the taps now for 11 days. We are promised a trickle ‘in the next few days’, although it won’t be clean enough to drink. It's a measure of our desperation that we're all excited by the prospect of doing laundry. Meanwhile, no one’s had a bath for longer than we care to think about and the kitchen is piled to the ceiling with bottled water. Even the dog is drinking Evian.

 

Domestic matters aside, I’ll be taking part in a panel discussion at the Frontline Club in London at 7.30 on 23^rd August, along with my friends and fellow writers Rob Gifford and Duncan Hewitt. Details can be found here: http://www.frontlineclub.com/club_events.php?event=871 We’ll be chaired by our friend Carrie Gracie of the BBC. The topic will be whether the international press adequately covers China. I will have had a bath by then.