Holding Hands at Midnight

        My new novel "Holding Hands at Midnight" is resting, like a bottle of good wine. I have edited it and feel it is ready for publication. I have printed it out so can now read it on the page rather than the screen. However, I think that before it is let loose upon the world, I have to read the printed version as if I had just picked up a book from a bookshop and was browsing.

        I tried to do just that, read it. It was impossible. All the characters have inhabited my head for the past three years, day and night, on my walks, in the pub, at my desk, in my dreams, wittering away, pulling my sleeve saying "Give me more lines. I would have said or done so and so."

        "No you wouldn't. I decide what you do and what you say."
        "That's what you think."

        I could not read it. It was too close to home. So I have sent a synopsis to various publishers and am about to give a printed copy to a trusted friend to read and comment, hopefully honestly. It is a difficult book and I suspect some family and friends will not like it. It is set in the 1960's and has four main characters, all in love with each other in various combinations at different times, but all at the end of the day loyal and supportive of each other. Two are women who escape unfulfilled marriages by falling in love with each other. This leads to their outraged husbands casting them out, homeless. They survive by becoming prostitutes, helped by a sympathetic married couple. In time the relationships between the four of them develop in surprising ways, complicated by the two lesbian prostitutes having a child each, and the married couple having two children. So we have a household of four adults and four children. The children are very happy in this menage until questions are asked at school.
        There is a sub plot concerning the daughter of one of the prostitutes. She writes stories for children and has one accepted by the BBC, who turn it into a series for children's television. BBC want to interview her. A ten year old would normally be accompanied by her Mum. But her Mum might be recognised by some of her punters. Tricky.
       Then one of the adults gets breast cancer, and the rather unorthodox household in which she lives, sustains her until she dies, and sustains her children after her death.

I will be asked what do I know about prostitutes and in particular lesbian prostitutes. In my twenties on my way home from the pub I came across a woman lying in the gutter with her face kicked in and her arm and ribs broken. I took her to hospital and looked after her and discovered that she was a prostitute living with her lesbian partner. It so happened that at that time I fell out with my landlord and became homeless and the two lesbian prostitues took me in and gave me a home, and I lived with them for nine months and that was a very happy time. So I do know enough to write about these subjects.
        But I may well be accused of glamourising prostitution. All I can say is this. There have been, probably are still, happy and successful prostitutes. I knew two of them fifty years ago. I was not surprised to read "The Intimate Adventures of a London Call Girl" by Belle de Jour. Nor was I surprised last year when I met her at the Oxford Literary Festival to discover that the author was Dr Brooke Magnanti, a research scientist specialising in neurotoxicology and cancer epidemiology. Very handsome is Dr Brooke. You could see why she was successful as a hooker. I was considerably hooked.
        So that I can separate myself from the characters in my novel, and read it as a new reader, I have decided to divert my mind to other matters. I have made a start on the next book. In fact I am now on page 41. Without telling you what it is about, there are two possible titles at the moment.
        1. "The Floors of Silent Seas." Quotation from T.S.Eliot. "I should have been a pair of ragged claws, scuttling across the floors of silent seas."
        2. "Green in Judgement." I need to look that one up, but I'm sure it was Shakespeare, Anthony and Cleopatra "My salad days, when I was green in judgement."
        Votes please.