Quintin Jardine's blog

Some times stand out. Every so often you have one, and afterwards you can’t pick holes in it at all; not a flaw to be found. Try this one, my yesterday:

You awaken  in a nice spa hotel, hidden  five kilometres along an old camino from the nearest town, in a deep, tree-lined valley that stays mostly in shade until around nine. A leisurely breakfast is allowed to settle, and then you set out, under the September sun. You walk up a zig-zagging dirt road for an hour or so, (not too fast, no point tiring yourself out) until at the top of the small mountain that you’ve climbed, you find a sign-post. You take the direction marked ‘restaurant’ and you walk on until you reach it. By the time you’ve rehydrated, lunch seems like a good idea, so you eat, Catalan tipic, tomato bread and anchovies, then butifarra and chips. When that’s done, you walk back: there’s a bonus, in that most of it’s downhill; you did the hard work earlier. Back at the hotel it’s mid-afternoon, a nice time to sit on the terrace and absorb a couple of beers, and then to find a sun-bed in the garden and doze at the river’s edge, vaguely aware of Tomasz Stanko, and Jose Padilla, and Natalie Merchant on your iPod. You’ve walked about ten clicks earlier; you don’t want to stiffen up, but fortunately the spa has a sauna and a salt-water jacuzzi. There couldn’t be a better preparation for dinner, and a nice chilled bottle of Anna de Codorniu, to round everything off.

You see, Lou Reed’s not the only guy who can have perfect days. And did I say, Eileen, I’m glad I spent it with you?

Heading off this afternoon for a couple of days in the foothills of the Spanish  Pyrenees, in a very nice little spa hotel called La Central, which could not be further from the Central Hotel of my youth, the one in Glasgow that was too posh for me to enter save once, at the only Former Pupils’ dinner I ever attended, a black tie job with a bottle of whisky on every table, dangerous fare for an eighteen-year-old. Happily I didn’t see much of ours, and  anyway, the train home was only a short totter away.

Anyone else remember Glasgow Central Station in the 60’s? Those who do will remember The Shell, the casing of a howitzer projectile on a plinth which was used as a charity collection box. However in all the hundreds of occasions that I passed through the station, as I did every school day from the age of 10, I never saw anyone put even a halfpenny in the slot. No, its real purpose was as a place of assignation, where you met your girlfriend for a night at the movies. It was right in the middle of the concourse in those days, a good position tactically for boys and girls in the event of a first date, following an initial meeting in a dance hall that might have been better lit, for it allowed either party to hide behind the newspaper stall for reappraisal, as it were, and if such was the judgement, to slink quietly back on to the train, or out through the side entrance. (I never heard of both he and she hiding behind the same stall, but it must have happened.) I rush to say that I never did such a thing to a young lady. I took centre stage every time. But it was probably done to me once or twice.

There is no newspaper stall in the Central that we will visit in a few hours. Nor is there a Shell, nor  trains, nor even passing traffic. But there is a very nice dining room, a match for the Malmaison, or La Fourchette any day of the week.

She’s fine; leave her alone. He’s the one with the problems. Mind you, I’d love to hear your definition of ‘growing up’, for the benefit of the ladies in my family. As it turns out, in the next book,the girl in question will be growing in the other direction.

I’ve been saying for a while that I’m glad I have no new work publishing in the last half of this year. The book scene is dominated currently by political autobiography. First Mandelson, now Blair, next Bush. We watched Tony a couple of nights ago, in what was more of a conversation with Andrew Marr than an interview by him. You have to give it to Random House; they got their launch strategy spot on. No review copies, no leaks, no serialisation. You want to read it, buy it.  BBC interview on day one. Day two, the media’s full of ex-Captain Barbossa’s friends (no, scratch that, former acolytes, for he doesn’t have any friends) scrabbling to pull something from the wreckage, thus generating even more interest and more sales.

Overall, I’ve always liked Blair more than I’ve disliked him. Still do. But . . . he’ll always be  a pale pink shadow of Thatcher in my eyes. Thatcher? Yes, for he’s convinced me that he’s a Tory at heart. When  Marr put that to him, gently, he said ‘I’m not, I’m a Progressive.’ But, in Northern-speak that’s the same thing, and Tony is essentially a man of the north. No, it’s not just a label. My wife’s dad, a tanker captain, was a Progressive councillor, as was the ruling right-wing group in Edinburgh for decades. Politically, Tony Blair is me; he’s no more a socialist than I am. Personally, he’s damned himself forever as weak, maybe even cowardly. He will be accused of weakness in going along with Bush on Iraq, but I don’t buy into that. Iraq was a cabinet decision, and responsibility must be collective. Only Robin Cook resigned over it. Even Clare Short backed it, initially. No, Blair was weak in not sacking or moving Brown, regardless of the consequences. Every contemporary account agrees that the man sought to undermine Blair as leader and as PM from Day One. To  say now,  ‘Yes he was a shit with no political judgement, and he knifed me in the back, but I kept him because he was a good Chancellor,’  just doesn’t wash. Every Chancellor has behind him a deputy of cabinet rank, the Chief Secretary, who could take over at a stroke of the pen. As I read the emerging histories of the period, it’s clear to me that TB should have moved Brown to the Foreign Office, or even the back benches, after the ’01 election and put one of his own in next door. He wouldn’t have resigned over it, not immediately; his overt greed for power wouldn’t have let him. But he’d have been emasculated. If only Tony himself hadn’t lacked the balls to do it.

Woke up this morning to the sad news of the New Zealand earthquake. Thankfully, there seem to have been no fatalities. We visited Christchurch a few years ago; I’ve maintained ever since  that it’s the most English city I’ve ever seen, including any in England. I hope that it and its inhabitants recover quickly and that  the damage proves to be superficial rather than irreparably severe. Good luck, one and all.

I take it you’re on US time, Lorraine. Yes Skinner 19 is out, but so is Skinner 20, ‘A Rush of Blood’. Checkout http://www.campbellreadbooks.com for details and availability.

You are a very meticulous reader. To answer your question, no I donlt have a story-board, but I have a large database. Now one of mine. Who’s PC Pyle?

It’s lunch-time and I’m knackered already. I have some excuse though; we were up at 5 this morning to catch the 07:50 flight to Girona. Just had lunch and it’s bloody hot. Wish I was back in East Lothian already. Since last I flew out of Edinburgh Airport they’ve greatly increased the size of the security area. Did it speed the process? No chance. If anything it took longer; larger facilities are no damn good if you don’t employ any new people to staff them.

I don’t know about you, but whenever I have to set my alarm for a seriously early hour, I might as well not bother, for I always waken at least two hours before it’s due to go off. But if I relied on that . . .

The saving grace is that I am now in the land of the siesta, for which I am now bound. Adios.

I make that five questions, but I’m only going to answer one of them. Xavi will not be in Primavera’s next adventure, because, although he does live nearby, he’s fictional in her world. He will have a story all of his own, called The Loner; it’s his autobiography. On present plans that will be published in the UK on March 31. It’ll be a hardback, cover price £12.99; as usual what the stores charge will be up to them. Campbell Read Books will have signed copies for sale, post free in the UK, subsidised for the rest of the planet.

Just back from doing the hour that I trailed a few days ago on East Coast FM, East Lothian’s community radio station. So far it broadcasts only on line, but it has a strong and powerful case for a localised licence, to make the FM in its title reality. Ian Robertson, one of the powerhouses behind the project, was there to greet me, and I went on air with Les McKellar, the Thursday morning presenter, and Jim Anderson his side-kick. We did an hour of knockabout; we enjoyed it, so did Gillian, see below, and hopefully everyone else did too.

In an age when local newspapers are becoming that in name only, (I heard of one that wouldn’t cover an event because its photographer doesn’t work Thursdays.) and when Independent Local Radio is making a nonsense of that description with centralised programming covering two or more licence areas, stations like East Coast FM have an ever more important role in filling the gap that their withdrawal has left, giving people an insight into what’s happening in their communities and a voice in them into the bargain.  So come on Ofcom; get the finger out and give them the recognition they deserve.

Whatever happens, I have an open invitation to go back, and believe me, I’ll be taking it up.

Thank you very much. It’s good to know for sure that we had a listener.

Today the Johnnie Walker Championship begins at Gleneagles. It’s the last qualifying event for selection for the European Ryder Cup team, which will be announced on Sunday, by the captain Colin Montgomerie. Much is being made about Monty’s dilemma in choosing the three wild card picks which he will have, on top of the nine players who emerge from the selection system. The way things stand, four European tour members who are not automatically in the side, all in the world’s top 20 or thereabouts, have opted to play for obscene money in the US this week rather than show up to fight for their places. So what’s big Colin going to do? The choice is his. Does he pick three from Casey, Donald, Harrington, and Rose? (Although for my money Justin has disqualified himself since he’s played only six European Tour events this year.) Does he pick, say, two of them and give a wild card to the tenth guy in the qualifying tables? Does he take a hard line and say, ‘Sorry guys, you should have tried harder to make the team’?

Whatever, it seems to me that he has not been helped by the current selection process. It’s not all that old, and it was designed to favour players who are not completely loyal to European golf in  that they choose to spend most of their time  in the US. Before that, the top ten in the European order of merit qualified, with two captain’s picks. If that system was still in play . . . okay make it nine starters . . . the team at this moment, before the Gleneagles outcome is known, would be: Kaymer, McDowell, Westwood, Poulter, Casey, Jimenez, Eduardo Molinari, McIlroy, Donald. Monty’s wild card choices would then be relatively easy, as he’d be able to pick from the guys currently in form and also those with track records in the competition. The way things stand at the moment, with Hanson, the man in form, Ross Fisher, who’s been patchy all season, and the other Molinari brother in for Casey, Eduardo and Donald, he’s in a very difficult position.

Whatever choice he makes, it would be nice to think that he has the unanimous, unflinching support of the UK media. It would also be nice to think that there will always be sunshine in everyone’s sky . . . but there’s more chance of that happening, than of some of the weasels in the press corps getting on side.

The Edinburgh community has been getting itself steamed up of late over the plans of the city’s airport owner to charge motorists a £1 fee for delivering its customers to its door. I know, it sounds ridiculous, but that’s what they’re going to do. Petitions have been circulated and signed, but to no avail. BAA doesn’t give a toss for the travelling public and it’s going ahead regardless with its petty and avaricious plans, just as it has already in other places, Belfast, for example.

Its disregard for its users is also demonstrated by its silence over an issue over which it should be raising hell on their behalf. The approach road to the airport is shared with other commercial concerns. These include the Royal Highland Showground, at Ingliston, best known for its staging of the annual agricultural show of that name, but also for other exhibitions and events. When that centre isn’t in use there is no problem, but when it is . . .

I flew into Edinburgh in early June. I’d arranged to be picked up by our kid, but it was rather early for her to leave work, so I told her that I’d take a taxi to her office. When I got into the cab I apologised to the driver for the shortness of my trip, as opposed to the usual hire, for the city centre. He smiled and replied, ‘Don’t worry, we’ll be forever getting out of here.’ He wasn’t kidding. As it turned out something called Gardening Scotland was underway in the RHS; the effect on airport traffic was unbelievable. Before I knew it there was £10 on the meter and we hadn’t even reached the first roundabout. At that point I gave up, paid the driver off, walked to the Hilton Hotel, and arranged for my daughter to pick me up from there when she was ready.

Granted, this ridiculous bottleneck only happens for a few hours of a few days each year, but it shouldn’t be happening at all. When it does, it has such a massive effect on airport traffic that you’d think BAA would be deeply concerned about it. But it isn’t, because, I imagine, most of the impact is on passengers departing. It would be simple and inexpensive to develop an alternative exit from the Showground. If BAA wants to win itself some friends, why doesn’t it use the proceeds of its rapacious drop-off charge to help fund it? If it did, then it might find that it had acquired a degree of popularity, instead of being the city’s second most hated organisation, after Transport Initiatives Edinburgh, the outfit which is making such a spectacularly bad job of overseeing the unwanted and unloved tramway project.

Then let me de-bug you. Mark is Bob’s adopted son. To find out how he became a member of the Skinner family you have to go all the way back to Ordeal, when ge makes a very dramatic entry to  the story-line. He hasn’t featured much of late, but he hasn’t gone away.

I was on radio a year and more back with Denis Lehane, and some alleged reviewers. He’s a very fine novelist, and we were doing a book programme, but all these tubes wanted to talk to him about off air was the fact that for a while he’d been in The Wire’s writing team. I’ve never bought into the  mystique of the series, so I don’t know Dominic West, but in any event, that has nothing to do with my enthusiasm for Idris Elba as Skinner. The actor is more important than ethnicity or accent, and for me . . . and I do have some influence on the proposition . . . he is the man.

I’ve done events all around the world now, and at every one of them, I take questions.  One that comes up often is, ‘I’ve written/have an idea for a book. How do I get it published?’

My stock answer is ‘Step one; find yourself an agent.’ But you know, that’s becoming more and more difficult. Agencies are overflowing with submissions. I looked at one website recently and discovered that of the agents listed there, only one is currently accepting new work. It’s not a local problem either; when I gave my glib advice in Australia a couple of years back, it was pointed out to me that there are fewer than ten agencies in the whole damn country and they’re all fully employed.

So:

As an experiment, I’m going to change my stock answer. You have a manuscript, or an idea, run it past me and we’ll take it from there.

But:

Do not contact me with submissions through this blog.

Log on instead to http://www.campbellreadbooks.com and use the contact facility there.

Do not under any circumstances send print-outs. Only files will be accepted, in MS Word or PDF form.

We will consider English language submissions from the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

I’m not saying how long it will take but we will get back to you.

A gentle reminder that signed copies of every QJ title are available on the brother website http://www.campbellreadbooks.com, postage free in the UK and subsidised elsewhere. And although they’re not on the stock list, there is a limited supply of collectables available. For information on them, log onto CRB and send an enquiry to AJ.

I was a bit stunned when I came up with this gem, but my first ever appearance on radio was more than fifty years ago. It was a kids’ quiz programme called ‘Regional Round’, and the Scottish input was organised by a lady called Kathleen Garscadden, who was one of the founding figures of the BBC. It went out live, and my family gathered round various valve radios to listen. So there I was; all these squeaky wee boy and girl voices, and me. I was thirteen at the time but . . . Some lads have a terrible time when their voices break; they’re out of control for a while, three or four octave changes in a single sentence. But not me. I woke up one morning and I was a baritone. Every time I answered the phone, the voice on the other end said ‘Hello Bill,’ and I had to explain that I wasn’t my dad. Incidentally, that worked both ways, which led to a couple of embarrassing incidents with girlfriends a few years later. Anyway, there were all these effing chipmunks on the radio, until the inquisitor asked what you called a long pastry filled with cream and with chocolate on the top, and a voice that would have sounded like Lanarkshire’s answer to Bryn Terfel, only he wasn’t born then or even close, boomed out ‘An eclair’. My mother dined out on it for years afterwards . . . the story, not the eclair.

I’ve done a lot of radio since then, home and away, the furthest being New Zealand, where I once did a live interview on a mobile phone while arriving at an airport and getting out of a car. I hadn’t driven it, but my driver had just done a piece herself, a book review, while at the wheel. One of the great things about radio stations is that they’re usually hard to find. The original Radio Clyde studio, for example, was a few floors up in a high-rise in Anderston, but you’d never have known it, and Radio Forth still hides behind an anonymous door in a street that bears its name. (If you doubt me on this, try to find Sunny Govan Radio in Glasgow.) I’ve always imagined that their reclusiveness was based on the fact that the first thing any worthwhile revolutionary does is to seize the radio station. I really did believe this in Prague; the station there was one floor up in a tenement block that reminded me of a back street in Bridgeton. It was magic; they still had turntables, in an era when cd players were becoming rare in British studios, since everything was going digital.

This is all a preamble to what I’m doing on Thursday morning, August 26, around 11am. I’m going into East Lothian’s very own radio station, East Coast FM, for the very first time. At the moment, it broadcasts on-line — http://www.eastcoastfm.co.uk/ — but hopefully it will be awarded an FM community licence at the next allocation. I hope it’s going to be the first of many visits, for of all the stations I’ve been in and on around the world, none will give me more pleasure than this one, the closest to home. Today Haddington, tomorrow, the world.

I had an interesting meeting on Friday, in the very impressive HQ of BBC Scotland, on Pacific Quay, in Glasgow. (I’ve finally worked out how to get there without crossing the Kingston Bridge, and that’s a boon, I tell you.) I went there to spend half an hour in studio with Stuart Cosgrove, who’s presenting a new series for Radio Scotland, called ‘My life in five books.’ The result of our efforts will be broadcast some time soon. If you’d like to know what my five books were . . . keep your eye on the BBC schedules and listen in.

Sorry I haven’t been around much for the last couple of weeks, but just occasionally work makes me take a break from blogging. I’ve been busy for a while now, sleeping with a woman who is not my wife. She might as well be, though; her name is Primavera Blackstone and for about four months of the year she’s never out of my thoughts. She’s with me first thing in the morning, all through the day and last thing at night. I reckon I have another month of her company and then she’ll move out for a while, maybe till the middle of next year. Hell, that’s her calling again; she’s wearing me out.