It helps to have a couple of weeks off work, but I raced through this book in about a fortnight. What a contrast to the last book I read, which took far, far, far longer than it should.

Secret Servant: The Moneypenny Diaries is the second in Westbrook’s Moneypenny trilogy dealing with M’s right-hand woman and James Bond’s sometime muse. Not a great premise, you might think. Apart from a trip to the races in A View to a Kill we never see her away from her desk in the films, even if she is occasionally transported to a snazzy office inside an Egyptian ruin for The Spy Who Loved Me, or a submarine in You Only Live Twice. Oh, and Bond’s apartment, briefly, at the start of Live and Let Die.

So it’s a bit of a relief to find that these books aren’t about ordering paperclips and maintaining the stationery cupboard. In the first, Guardian Angel, Moneypenny played a key role in defusing the Cuban Missile Crisis. This second volume, Secret Servant picks up the story a few months later, just as Kim Philby has defected to the Soviet Union, after years of spying on British Intelligence from the inside.

Moneypenny befriends his wife and is sent behind the Iron Curtain to bring them back.

The language very clearly evokes the feel and spirit of the sixties, when a fancy dress was a frock, flirting was discrete and the hotbed of office gossip was the powder room.

It’s as gripping as the original, fast paced and well written, with a real sense of menace running through the Soviet chapters, but in the last quarter relies a little too much on telling the reader what has happened than on letting us experience it alongside our hero. It drops a star for that, unfortunately, but Westbrook (a pseudonym) has nonetheless written a cracking tale that keeps you guessing what will happen to the very end. Indeed, at times the only reason you know Moneypenny survives is that she wouldn’t have been able to retrospectively write her diary had she not.

It’s a worthy addition to the Bond cannon, and a great lead-in to the final volume in the series, Final Fling. That’s on my shelf waiting to be read; it can’t be long before I’m reaching to take it down.

Price£7.99 (£4.98 from Amazon)
Author Kate Westbrook
ISBN 0719567696

The snow is going, slowly. Unfortunately it’s turning to ice – thick ice, sitting an inch deep on the road. The council doesn’t come down this far with grit.

We snuck out early while the neighbours’ curtains were still closed and left our home-made hampers on their doorsteps. Biscuits, marmalade and beer, all home made. We could easily have skated across to them, and even my shoes, which have little rubber nobbles on the bottom, offered no stability.

It makes for good front-window viewing, of course. So far one woman with a dog and an old lady on a bike, but flat on their faces.

Merry Christmas.

This year’s Christmas preparations have been busier, longer and more involved than I can ever remember. Why? I don’t know.

In the last two days I’ve cooked lasagne for 11 (three portions will stay in the freezer), 11 pots of marmalade (the number is a coincidence), 130 biscuits for the neighbours (they’re getting the marmalade, too, along with home made wine and beer), 25 rum truffles and a second batch of yoghurt, to replace the disaster that was our first attempt.

We’ve been over to the nature reserve to find our Christmas branch, put up decorations, hung the cards on strings, finished our shopping and done most of our wrapping, although we’ve both run out of paper. Now all we want to do is sit down and relax.

This morning’s trip to Sainsbury’s, to get last minute forgotten supplies, wasn’t entirely pleasant. We’d tried going last night but gave up a quarter of a mile from home, having sat in the car for 25 minutes. This morning it took almost that long to get to the front of the queue at the tills, but at least we now have two nets of lemons and some eggs (the shame of having to buy such things when you have uncooperative chickens in the garden is hard to explain).

But the world still looks pretty in the snow, even if it is turning to slush and ice in some places, the festive TV is generally excellent so far, with a whole night of Victoria Wood last night, and an excellent biog on Oliver Postgate on BBC4 tonight (must pay more attention to what they show).

Neither of us has had time to do any of our personal things so far, like blogging on Rich’s part, or editing the book on mine, but despite the busy-ness I’m enjoying the run-up, well aware that Christmas does indeed only happen once a year and is always well worth the effort.

OK, so I’m behind the times here, but switching your network and keeping your number turns out to be simplicity itself. Why did it take me SIX YEARS? In fairness I did try and leave 18 months ago, but I got a good deal – a very good deal – that my old network failed to honour. It promised me all sorts of free texts and minutes, and then charged me for every text I sent, despite me pointing out that that wasn’t what we’d agreed.

In the end they refunded 12 months’ worth of them, so I’ve gone. To give them their dues, they tried to win me over with another offer of free texts and calls, clearly taking me for a bit of a fool. Know what I say to that, former network?

So, so long. You won’t be missed. I bagged a SIM at Asda that works fine in my existing, beloved, now fairly old phone. It doesn’t include any free minutes or free texts, but then it’s only 8p a minute to make calls and 4p to send each text, it’s far better than your deal.

My £5 top-up buys me 62 minutes of calls (which at my current rate of calling will last around 10 months), or 125 texts (roughly six months of usage). Compare that to your £12.50 contract and you can see why I won’t be rushing back.

They had promised us eight inches, so I was a bit disappointed. Anyhow, that’s a view of Chelmsford this afternoon. In the end we got about two inches and a short powercut, so I don’t think we missed out entirely.

Elsewhere, though, it was much more impressive. The A12 was blocked, people were sleeping in cars and there was the inevitable ‘where are the gritters / what is this country coming to’ phone in on the radio.

This is the second decent batch of snow we’ve had this year – the last was in February, which led to a spell of working from home and spooking the chickens, who hadn’t seen it before. This time around there was no working from home as we’re both on Christmas holiday, with two weeks of mince pies, mulled wine and cake ahead.

Yum.

This is a lengthy book. 1006 pages in all, although that’s not the metric I’d use when declaring it lengthy. The Pillars of the Earth is longer, but it isn’t lengthy. That’s because it’s the right length for the story it tells. It was well paced, fast moving, inspiring, engrossing and engaging enough to carry me through its 1100 pages without ever wondering when it would come to an end.

Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, though, often had me measuring the bulk of unread pages between forefinger and thumb, asking myself how long it would take me to get to the end. It is, then, both a long book and anlengthy book. Or at least, it was for me.

It’s an impressive undertaking – I certainly won’t deny that. Anyone who can keep track of a story so long and not lose their distinctive voice here and there along the way (Clarke never does) is a truly skilled writer, and on that score this book is a triumph, but clipping away half of the story and removing some of the various diversions would have made it move at greater pace and focussed the reader’s mind on the pertinent thread running through.

So would axing the footnotes, which present in abundance. One – an unusually lengthy one, it must be said – spreads over five pages, and I would argue that if it were really that important, and needed to be outlined in such great detail, it should probably have been weaved into the fabric of the story itself.

But, but, but, I think I may be in the minority here. It’s garnered impressive ratings on Amazon, with a four-out-of-five rating from 290 customer reviews. Professional reviewers, too, have heaped praise on the book, and their quotes are much in evidence on the covers.

So, your mileage may (and probably will) vary.

If that’s the case, Amazon is selling it at a discount right now, so bag yourself a copy and it’ll see you well into New Year.

Fancy a bit of culture?

We spent Saturday night watching Priceless, a French film about a money-grabbing playgirl on the French Riviera. It only counts as ‘culture’ on account of having subtitles, but it’s well worth grabbing a copy now that Amazon is knocking out the DVD for £3.58.

Audrey Tatou (Amelie, The Da Vinci Code) is Irene, the money-mad con-artist, who will bed any man with a fat enough wallet, and it doesn’t give away anything to say that she ends up bedding a pauper. That’s the premise. Or – at least – the way he changes as a result. You can tell that much from the trailer:

It’s beautifully filmed, and the story, with obvious parallels to Breakfast at Tiffany’s, is genuinely funny in a gentle slapsticky way. Cultured slapstick, obviously, on account of the subtitles.

Stars? Four.

It’s a while since I’ve written about the book, mainly because I’ve been so busy editing the thing.

It’s a big job. Some days I can work my way through three or four pages of the stuff I’ve already written. On others, three paragraphs would be something of an achievement. Am I taking too long over it? I don’t think so. There’s no point racing through and ending up with something you’re not happy with and clearly won’t sell.

I also know that this edit, making a second draft, won’t be the only one. I can see how it has improved so far, but I also know where it could yet be better. Even looking at the first couple of chapters, which I was quite happy with following the first thorough edit, I can see where a few little tweaks here and there could make things better still.

Fortunately I have two very helpful readers who have been running through it with pen in hand to pick out the bits that don’t quite work. It’s been very instructional and incredibly helpful, in large part because their points of concern have pretty much mirrored my own, which would suggest my self-criticism is valid. I’m also relieved that as we tend to agree on the points of issue I’m not kidding myself that it’s all great. That would be awful.

So the book is coming along and I’m now at the end of the second draft of the first five chapters. But that’s not the last chapter, and it’s far from the last edit, too.