It’s hot, and reckoned to get hotter as the week goes on. The cigales sing when the thermometer tops 24 degrees, and they were out in force before six this morning. We joined them, eventually, and sat by the pool eating croissants and bread, then threw our stuff in the car and headed for the coast.

From St Remy that means a ride through the Carmargue, famed for its flamingoes, horses and bulls. It’s a bit like the Fens with rice and better wildlife, although today that too seemed to be hiding from the fierce sun. Flamingoes, we saw a few, although none close at hand – not like last time. The bulls, which are said to make a fine beef steak (I was unaware beef came from bulls, no cows) sheltered under the trees, and the white Carmargue horses that weren’t out being ridden through the salty wetlands were tied up in the shade of their ageing open-sided stables. Only the humans, it seemed, were foolish enough to brave the full heat of the day.

Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer is a small seaside town with particularly good beaches and a small harbour where the fishing boats land their catch. We weren’t there for the beaches, so we walked around the out-of-season town and into the small church about which it is built. It’s small and dark, and on the walls there are plaques with the names of people said to have been cured by miracles at the church.

They’re attributed to the black icon in the crypt, a brick-built cellar kept hot by the flames of several hundred candles whose flames have blackened the arching roof. The icon is Saint Sarah, the daughter of Mary Magdalene, one of the three Biblical Maries after whom the town was named in the 1800s. Once a year, the gypsies of the town take out the icon on St Sarah’s day and walk it through the streets and into the sea. It’s quite an event, and always brings large crowds.

Not today, though.

So we dodged the lavender sellers outside the church and drove on to Aigues-Mortes, from which King (later Saint) Louis IX launched the Crusades. Like Saintes-Maries, I’ve been here many times before, but it still holds a certain charm. It’s walled on all four sides, with the bulk of the streets knotted up in the middle. There’s a square at the centre, with little shops and houses leading off it in all directions, slowly baking at the height of the day.

The city was rebuilt because Louis had no sea ports under his own control as he set out on a mission to convert, the other Mediterranean towns falling under control of Provencal rulers. Yet I don’t think he’d have too much trouble recognising today the town he founded centuries ago. He might even recognise his own statue at the centre.

We sat around, cooling down with a drink and putting off the moment we’d have to pour ourselves back into the roasting car for the ride back home, via what is reputed to be the most expensive supermarket in France to finish up the day in the pool.

Work feels a world away – not just a few hours’ train journey north. And, heat aside, Provence beats London hands down.

Swimming pools are pretty cool, too, in every sense of the word.

It’s four years since I was last in Provence, and little has changed. As you might expect. This is, after all, a part of the world where vast tracts look the same now as they did a hundred years ago. Much is older still: the Roman Maison Carree in Nimes, the Popes’ palace in Avignon, the three-tiered Roman viaduct in Gard, and the Carmargue houses built with rounded ends, their windows clustered in a way that protects their inhabitants from the fierce mistral wind.

Neither have more recent additions much changed. Not since I was last there, anyway. The Eurostar remains the best way to get to France, and the TGV is still as efficient, speedy and smooth as ever. It puts our trains to shame.

We caught a single-decker out of Gare de Lyon and sped down through the French countryside, watching as the Massif Central and then Lyon passed by to the west; the Alpine foothills and Mont Ventou to the east, calling in at such fragrant stops as Valence and Orange on our way to Avignon.

Dad met us at the station and drove us out to St Remy where we sat eating dinner on the patio in t-shirt and shorts, still hot at 23h as the bats swooped around the courtyard, the cigales sang their rasping songs in the trees all around, and fireflies danced in the trees at the end of the drive. It felt good to be back.

The BBC is an easy target because it makes a lot of its money from licence fees. Somehow that makes a lot of people think they know best how to run it. They don’t, of course, but the fact that the revelation of its bosses’ expenses has happened today – just after Parliament has been hauled over the coals for MPs shameful squandering of public funds – means they’re ready and willing to drag it over the same political coals.

Here’s a headline:

£350,000. Tsk tsk tsk. That’s 2,456 licence fees gone on expenses.

Why isn’t it more?

It sounds like a lot, but that £350K was run up by ten board members. An average of £35,000 each.

Over five years. So an average of £7,000 per person per year.

To run the BBC – a job that involved international travel, late nights, wooing suppliers, customers and talent, researching, entertaining and providing five national television networks, ten national radio networks, the World Service (radio and TV), 40 local radio stations and countless web sites.

They should really be congratulated for keeping things under such tight control.

No review this time around. Just a quote. This comes from By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept by Paulo Coelho.

Man runs into an old friend who had somehow never been able to make it in life. ‘I should give him some money,’ he thinks. But instead he learns that he is old friend has grown rich and is actually seeking him out to repay the debts he had run up over the years.

They go to a bar they used to frequent together and a friend buys drinks for everyone there. When they ask him how he became so successful, he answers that until only a few days ago, he had been living the role of the ‘Other’.

‘What is the Other?’ they ask.

‘The Other is the one who taught me what I should be like, but not what I am. The other believes that it is our obligation to spend our entire life thinking about how to get our hands on as much money as possible so that we will not die of hunger when we are old. So we think so much about money and our plans for acquiring it that we discover we are alive only when our days on earth are practically done. And then it’s too late.’

‘And you? Who are you?’

‘I am just like everyone else who listens to their heart: a person who is in enchanted by the mystery of life. Who is open to miracles, who experiences joy and enthusiasm for what they do. It’s just that the other, afraid of disappointment, kept me from taking action.’

‘But there is suffering in life,’ one of the listeners said.

‘And there are defeats. No one can avoid them. But it’s better to lose some of the battles in the struggle for your dreams and to be defeated without ever even knowing what you’re fighting for.’

‘That’s it?’ another listener asked.

‘Yes, that’s it. When I learned this, I resolved to become the person I had always wanted to be. The other stood there in the corner of my room, watching me, but I will never let the other into myself again – even though it has already tried to frighten me, warning me that it’s risky not to think about the future.’

45,369 words.

Of course I’m not going to gauge success on the number of words I’ve written. Neither am I going to proclaim it ‘finished’ when I hit a certain number. It’s finished when the story is told.

Crossing the 45,000-word mark this morning, though, was a bit of a happy moment as I’ve set myself a vague 90,000 word aim (target is too strong a word, I think), as conventional wisdom appears to be that the count that most publishers are looking out for is somewhere between 80,000 and 100,000 for a first-time novelist.

Reaching 45,369, with half of the story told, then, means that I’m pretty much in line to get there without making it unsaleably long, or so brief it would fit in a pamphlet. It’s 50.41% of 90,000 words.

So, what is 90,000 words in terms of regular book print? Well, looking around on the web most people seem to estimate around 10 words per line, with 25 lines per page in the average novel. So that would be 250 words to the page.

On that basis 90,000 words would run to 360 pages.

It’s not an exact science, of course. If you have a lot of dialogue you’ve probably written fewer words on each line with more lines overall, but it’s interesting to do the maths.

It must be quite idyllic being a cat. After a whole Sunday spent sleeping under the Japanese tree a couple of weeks ago, he spent this Sunday flopping about in a deck chair.

It’s a life of luxury.

I sometimes wonder whether all local papers as parochial as ours, which takes ‘local’ to its logical extreme. There are pages in the middle that report the smallest stories in town. Where else could you read about Joyce’s scones?

DARBY & JOAN – Mrs Ashford welcomed everyone to the meeting held at the community centre and get well wishes were sent to Mrs Barford. Members were thanked for their generous gifts for the club’s stall at the church fete on June 13. The competition for a wedding photograph attracted some lovely entries dating from 1924 to the present day and there were two photos printed on a cushion. Members had to think back to their childhood days to guess the answers to the nursery rhyme quiz which was one by Mrs Tebby. After that, members were pleased to tuck into Joyce’s scones and a cup of tea.

Or the amazing prizes on offer at the Women’s Institute?

WOMEN’S INSTITUTE – …the competition for a table mat was won by Jean Sapsford; and the runner up was Elsie Briggs. Members are reminded that meetings will start at 2.15pm in Broomfield Community Centre when the speaker will be Paul Irvine on health. The competition is for a cereal bowl.

Both of those are in this week’s issue.

The Book Thief is the perfect demonstration of why publishers are so keen to get their authors on those big tables you see in bookshops, or at least it was in my case. If it hadn’t been set out by the door in the shop near work I’d probably never have found that. That would have been a shame.

So, the premise. It is 1939, 1940, and the years around then, and Germany is at war. Liesel Meminger is abandoned by her mother, not entirely voluntarily, in the town of Molching, near Munich (don’t bother checking – it’s fictional). There, she is handed over to a loving foster father and a fierce foster mother, who ladels every sentence with a generous serving of German expletives. Had her younger brother not died on the train there, she’d have had company, and might not have had such a hard start in her new home, but he did, so she did.

Over the 550 pages that follow, Germany fights what eventually becomes a war of attrition and the book’s narrator finds his workload only ever gets heavier. That’s because the narrator is Death and there are an awful lot of bodies to pick up.

Who would ever have guessed that Death could be such a quirky, approachable character; likeable, even. Who could ever have known he had such a way with words, for if there is only one reason to read this book it’s surely the style of language.

Zusak is something of a linguistic genius, and if you don’t envy his skill at constructing sentences you’ll certainly never have read before, then you really ought to be writing yourself. Never expect the expected, as he pulls out perfect adjectives, powerful similes and metaphors that make me very jealous indeed.

But perhaps the trouble is that that is the only reason to read this book, and that’s a shame. I didn’t identify with any of the characters, I didn’t feel sympathy or empathy, and even towards the end I didn’t really care whether they survived the Allied bombing or became a fraction in the statistics of war.

Yet, still I don’t feel that the hours I spent in Molching, watching Liesel grow and mature was time wasted, and Kathryn thought it was great, which perhaps explains how it won itself a place on that table.

Overall, then, three out of five. Brilliantly written, not so brilliantly plotted.

I know warnings about packets of nuts containing nuts are nothing new. It’s a symptom of compensation culture that means manufacturers can’t afford not to print it, even if it’s a clear packet and it says ‘Mixed nuts and raisins on the front’.

So it wasn’t a surprise to see it on my bag of nuts

More surprising was the fact that they also felt the need to point out that they’d been ‘packed in a factory where nuts & sesame seeds are handled’.

Well thank goodness for that.

Here’s a secret: I’m writing a book.

Not the first, granted, although somehow I managed to forget to write about the Aperture book once it had been published and arrived in my hands. Don’t know why – it took months to put it together and despite some misgivings I have signed the contract for a second edition.

Anyhow, this isn’t that. This is fiction.

I had an idea for a story at the start of the year which matured over the next few months, pretty much until we went to the Dales at Easter, in fact. By then it was more or less worked out in my mind, and one evening I mentioned it at dinner and ended up sketching out the story. I hadn’t planned on doing that, but it’s probably as well that I did, as everyone said they wanted to read it.

So, on the train home, I started to write.

And it’s going surprisingly well. My characters are behaving, they’re saying the things I want them to say, and they’re not going off down any unexpected tracks. The secret, as I’ve discovered, is careful, extensive planning. It’s the only way you can keep them in control. After all, if you don’t know where you need to take them, you shouldn’t be surprised if they wander off on their own.

Skipping that stage was the cause of my downfall last time around. Back then I raced off with nothing but a word-count in sight and the results were, frankly, rubbish. It all petered out at 115,000 words, when the story was only half way told.

I’ve looked back at it since and it’s trash. And contrived trash at that.

Re-reading that blog entry, I can see that I’d managed to put down 50,000 words in three weeks, which should have told me something fairly obvious. Apparently it didn’t. This time, in a couple of months of writing I’d done 40,000 words. A respectable total, and one with which I’m satisfied, as I know this time around that the story has integrity.

That’s why the characters are behaving themselves: I know where they need to go, and I know what they need to say in every conversation. I also know who they are, how they got where they are, and how this defines their motivation for every move and spoken word.

It’s very fulfilling, but much harder work than I’d imagined. I’m determined to see it through, though. Hence this entry. Now that I’ve admitted I’m doing it, I have to finish it.

Watch this space.