Oh, yes, and socks. I can’t remember what kind of socks, because they’re under the duvet.

In a brief foray upstairs to make more lemon & honey (I’m paracetamol-intolerant, whatever the hell that means, so any of the conventional cold medications turn me into a shivering, vomitous wreck) I discovered the first curious vista I wish to offer you this morning.

On the dining table, Camden Council’s latest consultative missive regarding Hampstead High Street and the traffic flow there. (Endless tinkering has not solved the fundamental problem that the High Street was not designed to be a major arterial route from Euston to the A406 Circular Road. Funny, that. You would have thought that sheer weight of traffic – and I do mean weight: the surface collapses with sorry regularity – could be offset by signposts and new white lines. Apparently, some pesky laws of physics are imposed on the borough. Shocking example of the burden of over-centralised government.)

In any case, Mrs Harkaway – my companion in this epic journey of discovery – has clearly be perusing the document. This is unusual in itself, but the thing which makes it worthy of mention is that she has been perusing it with the help of an elderly pink toothbrush.

I suppose it’s fair enough. Many people would use a ballpoint to follow the lines on the page, perhaps even underline them. Those same people would also quite possibly chew on the back end of the pen. There’s a symmetry in Mrs H reversing the situation. All the same, I’m enchanted by the image of her taking a few moments this morning while the kettle was boiling to tap the glossy, environmentally unforgivable letter with a pensive Oral-B medium, and consider whether the latest white elephant is going to make our lives more difficult.

From all this you may gather that I still have an irksome lurgie, and am still refusing to leave the house lest I spread this vile plague to other, more tender souls who might develop the disease to its fullest horrid extent rather than bravely fighting it down to the merest cold. My heroic immune system, of course, has rendered this Ebola-related foulness a triviality. Mortal humans might be struck dead by the least….

Okay, okay. I won’t go out because I don’t want to. It’s cold and revolting and my eyes are gummed together and when I cough it sounds as if the lung-pixies in my chest are running with scissors. It’s un-threatening, not tremendously debilitating, and utterly trivial. It’s also really annoying and I’m in a monster sulk, because I honestly believed it would be gone by today.

It really needs to go soon. I’ve got important stuff to do.

I’ve inherited a frankly infuriating ethos regarding this situation, too, a note of professionalism which borders on machismo:

this is what separates the men from the boys, the pros from the amateurs – you write when you feel like hell. You write when hung over, you write when sick, you write when grieving and when broke, you write at all times unless your hands are secured behind your back with iron bands…

in which case you dictate.

So here I am, blogging, because I need to get my brain up to speed before I tackle the north face of Mount Second Novel.

By the way, I’m finding the climb technically tricky but pleasing, and the views are great. I’m worried that when I reach the top I may discover I’ve climbed a very small hill by a very indirect route – but that’s storytelling. Until you delivery the punchline, you don’t really know what you’ve got.

Next thing: a nice picture.

This is the view between a couple of houses in the old town of Scansano, a few miles from where Mrs H and I took our holiday in September.

Scansano looks, on first viewing, like a small, relatively modern place with not much to recommend it. You have to get out of your car and wander around to find the way into the lovely bit. Since the town really is as small as it appears to be, that’s no particular hardship.

Also no particular hardship is eating there. As you might expect from a Tuscan hilltown, there’s a great deal of decent pie kicking around.

Technically, by the way, Scansano is Etruscan.

You have to love that: the origins of the Etruscans are ‘lost in pre-history’. It’s a little like that tag archaeologists stick on objects in museums: ‘ritual significance’. It means: we have nooooo clue.

I thought I’d try including this picture because Richard, used a few in the website mock-up he showed me and the results were pretty electrifying. Granted, they were really cool images of pulp book jackets and stuff.

Speaking of cool images – to my amazement, I did a photoshoot for a fashion magazine the other day. It’s the first shoot I’ve been part of where the aim was to make me look amazing, as opposed to, you know, showing the truth. I was made up, primped, styled and posed, then leaned and re-leaned, lit, re-lit and finally preserved in perfection by a really cool photographer.

(Even his socks were cool. They were red, and they had a sort of looping wiggle on them over the toes, which suggested toes without actually looking like toes. I really want a pair of those socks for days like today. )

“Looky moody!” he said.

I don’t really know how to do that. I thought about things which make me cross: people who steal penguins from zoos and let them die; bad hamburgers; Prop 8; the Heathrow extension.

“Too cross! Same intensity, more contemplative!”

I thought about the middle chapters of my new book.

“Too sleepy! I like that posture, though, that’s more relaxed!”

I retained the set of my shoulders, and wondered where I could get a pair of his socks.

“Yeah, perfect! Nick!” I looked up. He stopped shooting.

“Oh, sorry, Nick, I didn’t mean you. There’s two other Nicks in here. Nick? Yeah, can you sort the light? Oh, and can you,” that’s me “go back to how you were?”

Um.

I spent a lot of time wondering how I could persuade Acquascutum to give me one of these amazingly gorgeous coats – especially after the shooting team put me in a brown jacket and decided it suited me much more. I loved that coat. It’s the last thing I need and it’s too stinkingly expensive for me even to contemplate actually buying one. Ah, well. Apparently my “damn, that thing’s expensive” face is perfect for moody. I must remember that.

Anyway. That’s what the weather’s like on Planet Harkaway this morning.

That, and I’m hungry. Damn.

(Oh, and a quick note regarding the US author tour, because people were asking; I don’t know anything about it yet, but if it happens I imagine it will happen with paperback publication in autumn ’09. With any luck, people will start buying things again before then…)