I was diagnosed with PD in 2021. They say there are 40 symptoms and each person gets a different pick-n-mix. I’ve only ever had the tremors and a few falls. In the last 18 months I lost 20 kg in weight (from 74 down to 54). I have a friend in Brighton who’s had Parkinson’s for 18 years and never had a tremor, but he’s had dozens of falls, including once backwards down a flight of concrete steps. He survived that, survived them all.

On June 30th I called 111 (our non emergency paramedics) and they took me to hospital in Brighton where I was fitted with a feeding tube (called a Peg) for all my food and liquid. I’m unable to swallow, even the smallest mouthful. For a month I was totally bed-ridden. At the end of July they transferred me to a care home in Hove for rehabilitation. After 6 weeks I can walk a bit but not much else.

I am investigating applying for palliative care only, which I think means I would have to starve myself while a morphine drip slowly eases me towards the crematorium. If I’m able I will make more posts on this final journey in order to share it with you, my readers. In the meantime let’s end with the good news that Paradise Press is going to publish Laurence and the Hippies, my long-awaited (I wish!) sequel to Lillian and the Italians. 

This is where I should wax philosophical and share with you the wisdom of my 84 years. At my funeral or memorial service Charles Aznavour is going to sing “Yesterday when I was young”, which to some extent captures my feeling of a life that combined creativity (my 6 published books) with indulgence – I was 68 before the Prince of Persia entered my life and stayed there. My other great loves have been the many friends, male and female, that I collected along the way. For example Mary and Susan, whom I met in Bahrein in 1976 who are now, 50 years later, hugely cherished (Mary flourishes still but Susan is fighting a battle with dementia, a battle which her mother and mine fought and lost). Friendships for me are a long haul, not ships that pass in the night. I should also add that my four rescued dogs have been the other great loves of my life..

If anybody feels like sharing their Parkinson’s view point, please feel free.

Here is a picture from my college years. As you can see it’s true that old age is not a blessing!

Daniel Silva: AN INSIDE JOB

From a boat in the Venetian lagoon, art restorer and retired super-spy Gabriel Allon spots a body which will kickstart his latest investigation into criminal goings-on in the art world. The dead woman recently identified a painted-over insignificant work in the Vatican archive as a lost Leonardo. Doubly lost, after its recent removal from the Archive, this is already the most valuable picture in the world.

The Camorra, Calabria’s savage Mafia, is open to bidding from unscrupulous collecters. The painting is soon worth half a billion dollars. Allon plans to steal it back and replace it with a perfect copy, knocked off in a busy few days by – who else? – Allon himself, who is an accomplished forger on top of his many other skills.

An Inside Job is pure hokum from the Dan Brown School of Writing (of which Daniel Silva was a past master long before Mr Brown entered the frame – this is Gabriel Allon’s twenty-fifth outing). Silva gives this hokum a stylish elegance and enough detail to carry his readers over the ‘You’ve-Got-To-Be-Kidding’ threshold and make the inconceivable convincing. This is the most entertaining spy fiction since Peter O’Donnell’s Modesty Blaise books. A joy to read.

David McCloskey: DAMASCUS STATION

Middle-ranking CIA officer Sam Joseph targets a Syrian woman, Mariam Haddad, as a potential “source”: in Damascus she is close to people who are close to the ruthless President Assad. She is biddable, and he successfully recruits her in Paris, but he hasn’t allowed for the procedural irregularity of falling in love with her, which will have personal and professional consequences for both of them.

The CIA mount an operation to eliminate two murderous brothers who are key players in the fight against the insurgents threatening Assad’s rule. But the brothers are aware that there is a mole in the presidential palace and are plotting to kidnap Sam and torture the mole’s identity out of him.

David McCloskey, a former CIA analyst, makes an impressive debut with a plot worthy of John le Carré and a rugged pacy style that recalls Robert Ludlum. War-torn Syria is vividly captured – especially Damascus, “a pulsing neon heart feeding the country’s gangrenous body.” The torture sequence is vicious enough to make the reader sweat.

Sam’s potty-mouthed female superior is a fun character, like the movie version of James Bond’s Q: “Procter was many things, and one of them was short.” This is a book – and an author – you should add to your must-read list.

Katherine Mezzacappa: LUCIE DUMAS

London in the 1870s. Samuel Butler, the eminent Victorian man of letters, maintains a young French woman in a nearly respectable brothel in Bloomsbury. He shares her with his best friend; they each visit her once a week. Butler is a bit stingy, so Lucie has to rely on other casual trade to sustain her modest lifestyle (she has a maid!).

Lucie Dumas is a real person, mentioned in a biography of Butler. Katharine Mezzacappa has created Lucie’s autobiography. She was sent to London by a married lover in Lyon, whose child she bore. The child was taken away and is the subject of much longing, as is the flint-hearted lover. She finds a long-lost brother and bonds twice with younger prostitutes, one of whom has a terrible death from syphilis. She respects ‘Monsieur’ (as she always refers to Butler), but she does not love him.

A well-intentioned Christian ‘rescues’ Lucie to a rigidly disciplined Magdalen House, run by devout but heartless nuns (she is made a seamstress rather than a laundress). She escapes after two years to another, more downmarket brothel in Handel Street, back in Bloomsbury (I lived in Handel Street for two years in the 1960s) where a different ugly death is waiting to claim Lucie.

More courtesan than mistress, Lucie’s life is grimy – grim, even. Hers is not a bawdy tale like Fanny Hill. There is almost no explicit sex (one of her punters likes to be viciously beaten); this is social history rather than a piece of literary porn. I fear some bookshops would park it on the Misery Memoir shelf – there are resonating echoes of the original Les Miserables. Signora Mezzacappa has researched the period thoroughly, and her writing – the ‘voice’ she gives Lucie – is at the high end of biography, as it was in The Maiden of Florence, her previous exploration of one of history’s seamier corners.

Michael Connelly: NIGHTSHADE

Prolific crime-writer Michael Connelly launches another new series, set on the  island of Santa Catalina off the coast of California and administratively part of Los Angeles County. LAPD Detective Sergeant Stilwell has been posted to the island’s Sheriff’s office as a kind of banishment after a case in which he made enemies on the mainland. When the body of a woman with a purple streak in her hair is washed up in a harbour, Stilwell’s investigation uncovers a streak of corruption among the island’s elite residents. As well as purple hair the victim had a colourful life as a gold-digging good-time girl.

As always, Connelly takes us through the mundane routine of a murder investigation: interviews and forensics, a few truths but more lies, false leads and blind alleys. The first 200 pages of Nightshade are slow and heavy going, until another murder and a kidnapping kick off a change of pace and some new suspects.

This is not Connelly’s best, a long way short of the peak of his Harry Bosch series, books like The Concrete Blonde, The Poet and Echo Park. I hope this is just a temporary downturn and the next volume – bring back Bosch! Or the Lincoln Lawyer – is something with more edge, more tension. Here he seems to be treading water. We know he can do better – a great deal better – than Nightshade.

LIONEL DAVIDSON: A Long Way to Shiloh

A couple of years ago I re-read Lionel Davidson’s Kolymsky Heights from the 1999os and confirmed my first impression of it as one of the greatest thrillers I’ve ever read. I decided to try A Long Way to Shiloh, first published in 1966 and widely acclaimed as another of his best books, which I somehow missed out on. It is very good indeed, but Kolymsky still gets my gong!

A young British professor academic is invited to Israel to follow the clues from a newly discovered Scroll to the location of an historical artefact of inestimable value to world Jewry. Initially reluctant, he goes to Israel and is soon fighting Israeli bureaucracy as well as the obstacles provided by military security in this most paranoid of states (with some justification). Rather a naughty boy, Caspar relentlessly pursues a young female interpreter on the team even though she already has a fiancé.

The writer who kept coming to my mind was Hammond Innes, whose adventure stories I read avidly in the 1950s and 60s. Writing about an Arctic landscape, Innes could make you shiver on a midsummer Mediterranean beach. Lionel Davidson has a similar gift for evoking a location so vividly that he takes your senses there. The Judean wilderness is “a place of jackals and prophets, very old, very dry, very dead.” The chapter in which Caspar hunts for a hidden cave in the hills above the Dead Sea has all the nail-biting tension of an Indiana Jones movie.

Lionel Davidson died in 2009 but his thrillers are still in print. You’ve got a major treat in store if you’ve not read him before. I intend to catch up on some more of his books.

SALTBURN

I  missed this in the cinema, so caught up this week (thanks, BBC).

I took an instant dislike; it seemed a very low-rent revamp of Brideshead Revisited. Working-class Oliver, on a scholarship to Oxford, is drawn into upper-crust Felix’s circle and then is invited to the family seat – a stately-home sized mansion, of course, with a maze and a creepy butler.

Felix has a bulimic sister, an ADHD semi-adopted brother, scatter-brained bohemian parents (Rosamund Pike and Richard E. Grant). There are parties every night, lots of booze, a few drugs, sex for some – Felix, nightly. But Oliver has developed a crush on Felix which is welcomed but not reciprocated. And then things begin to unravel ….

I found the characters totally unsympathetic and the endless Brideshead references tiresome until the “unravelling”.

Felix (Jacon Elordi) is very much a modernised Sebastian from Brideshead, posh, spoilt and imposssibly handsome. Barry Keoghan’s Oliver is short, plain and nerdish, perfectly out of his element, and I began to find him tiresome, as do some of the family. But the “unravelling” last chapter confirms what a fine young actor he is. I was disappointed that the creepy butler (Paul Rhys) didn’t contribute to the unravelling.

Writer/director Emerald Fennell serves up a clever slice of period parody. Some fairly explicit sex (and masturbation) have probably induced younger viewers to play with the FF. Patience is required to sit through the whole two hours. Mine came close to running out. I found myself remembering how imagnificent the 1980 13-hour TV Brideshead was – and how unavoidably slow, especially the whole episode devoted to the death of Laurence Olivier. The 2008 movie was a lot shorter and did Evelyn Waugh almost as much justice as the TV version; it also had Emma Thompson at her most edgy best, which is enough for me to plan a third viewing. Once is going to be enough for Saltburn.

Saltburn can be seen on BBC iPlayer

I paid £120 upfront in October for 6-weeks’ Intensive Marketing for my Hollywood novel SOAP-STUD & BLUE-MOVIE GIRL and my Mafia Romance LILLIAN AND THE ITALIANS.

Roslyn Pray (probably not her real name)  claimed to be an “Amazon Marketing & Book Growth Specialist” and incorporated genuine testimonial links from the website, of a “hybrid” Canadian publisher, who checked out OK online and gave me a false sense of confidence.

“Roslyn Pray” kept up a nicely worded correspondence and endlessly promised a tailored marketing campaign, but the only thing she delivered was a review of her own on Reddit which got the plot wrong – she hadn’t “reddit”. I gave her two video-clip trailers from my publishers which were never used. Several sincere-sounding apologies for the delay, but NO ACTUAL PROMOTION. Zero change in my Amazon Rating and zero e-book sales. It was only yesterday when I posted a warning review about the Canadian publishers on TrustPilot that i knew she was a scammer. Her email address includes a false connection to hybrid publishers. My bad: the publishers are genuine but she is not.

This woman is a crafty operator; she even created a fake contract. UK£120 down the drain. I could use some four-letter words for this scamstress.

Over the past few weeks I have been contacted by others peddling the same help with Marketing and Manipulation of Keywords. Are they all scammers? Are they all HER? I guess there’s no way to tell the fake from the bona-fide  unless someone you know and trust can point you towards a service that has worked for them.

Writing defines me. It’s what I do. At 83, in declining health, I am 60 pages into a new novel, a tw0-family saga. with a strong LGBT element – my trademark! My books sell poorly, because I have limited IT skills. I wish I could find someone – an Influencer? – who would genuinely help with Promotion and Marketing without charging vast upfront sums. If Ms Pray had been the real McCoy I would have paid her a generous commission out of my my boosted sales.

The self-publishing road is fraught with conmen – and con-women. too, it seems. Authors, beware!

Alan Hollinghurst: OUR EVENINGS

I approach a Hollinghurst novel, especially one as bulky as this, with some apprehension, since he often seems to be channelling Henry James, with drawn-out descriptions and a snail’s pace. Pleased to report that these are not issues with Our Evenings, an autobiographical study of a mixed-race British actor, David Win, the product of an expatriate Englishwoman’s brief affair with a Burmese officer. His mother settles into a lesbian marriage, which gives David as much security to grow up in as any other boy, although his skin colour always sets him apart right up to the book’s ending in the era of Covid lockdowns.

The story begins with his schooldays on a private scholarship to a boarding school on the South Downs. Giles Hadlow, his benefactor’s son, is a fellow boarder and casts a shadow over David’s life that lasts beyond school. David’s natural gift for comedy makes him popular, and he enjoys the sexual favours of several other boys. As we know, many boys grow out of schoolboy homosexuality. David is one of those who doesn’t, and as his acting skills take him without too many setbacks into a long and multi-faceted career in theatre and television, there are flings and love affairs, although not until middle age does he find a love that endures. Giles Hadlow, a Minister in the Cameron administration, reappears, as do some other Old Boys from their schooldays.

Hollinghurst is, I think, unchallenged as the doyen of British gay authors, and Our Evenings (odd title) plays out against the societal changes in gay life pre- and post-Liberation, through HIV/Aids to where we are now, with same-sex marriage and parenting. This is a big book with a big cast of mostly likeable characters, all splendidly rounded, and an engaging storyline, which gets richer with each passing decade. A few critics have hailed this as Alan’s best novel, but for me only A Line of Beauty came close to the outstanding level of his debut, The Swimming-Pool Library and that may owe something to the superb TV adaptation. Our Evenings is good, very good, but not quite in the pantheon of supreme gay fiction.

Mr Burton

An atmospheric version of the early life of Richard Burton, the miner’s son who became one of the greatest stage and screen actors of his time and married Elizabeth Taylor, not once but twice.

The Mr Burton in the title is not the star but the village schoolteacher Philip Burton, who wrote radio plays as a sideline and coached young Richard Jenkins in the art of acting; needing a stage name, Young Jenkins became Richard Burton. Toby Jones is very much the “flavour of the year” and in perfect pitch here as the man who saw the boy Richard’s potential and nurtured his modest talent into the strato-sphere. Lesley Manville has a fruity role as Philip’s landlady, who is so motherly that they both call her “Ma”.

The script tentatively hints at homosexuality – why did Philip devote so much of his life to this particular schoolboy? – but possibly for want of evidence this issue fizzles out.

Harry Lawtey delivers a believable portrait of young Richard, the uncouth son of a hard-drinking coalminer who almost accidentally turns out to have the makings of an actor. Getting him to “talk proper” gives the movie some humour and is, of course, the core of what made Richard a star. Lawtey is good in the transitional stages but he doesn’t get the mature Richard’s glorious resonance quite right; it comes across as a bit of a parody. But the tone of the movie is fine, with none of the hyperbole that usually messes up Hollywood biopics.

By chance I watched an early Burton movie on TV last week, The Robe, the Biblical epic that was famously the first movie in CinemaScope. We hear the voice of Jesus but never see his face, relying on the reactions of the other characters, including (oh dear) Victor Mature, one of the prime contenders for the All-Time Worst Actor award. The best thing in the movie is Jay Alexander whose shrieking Emporer Caligula recalls Kenneth Williams’s Captain Ahab in Round the Horne. Our Richard doesn’t look too comfortable in a leather miniskirt tunic but That Voice gives his Marcellus a kind of magic. That Voice made him the best-ever King Arthur in the Broadway cast of Camelot: aping Rex Harrison’s approach to talking in a musical voice when you can’t sing was never better than Burton’s Arthur.

But he could be a klutzy boy on screen (and on stage too: they say his Private Lives with la Taylor was beyond travesty). In some of the movies he made with Liz you can almost see him sneering at the script (“Sorry, people, I know this is crap but we needed the money”) whereas she always gave a good performance even in bad movies, which is the hallmark of a true professional. Of course, at their best – in, say, The Taming of the Shrew and (sublimely) Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, — they were the crème de la crème.

One of these days I must post on here the naughty details of the call I listened in on between Liz (at the Dorchester) and Richard (in Yugoslavia) back in my career as a telephonist at the Continental telephone exchange in London. Spicy!

Mr. Burton can be seen for free on BBC iPlayer