I have regular meetings with my agent. We chat, we can see each other... yet we're 80 miles apart, and even better it doesn't cost anything. We use Skype the internet phone/video thingy and it's absolutely brilliant. Now, what I don't understand is why so few people use it. Oh, I know Skype has millions of customers. But my agent is about the only person I know I use it regularly with. We have several friends who have it - but they don't keep it on, which misses the whole point. Skype is like phoning, but it's better and it's free. And we have lots more friends who have broadband, but don't use Skype at all. I know it's a bit more of a faff than picking up a phone, because you have to be in the room your computer's in (unless you have one of the dinky Skype phones that work when the computer's switched off), but it's so much better than an ordinary phone call if you have video - particularly if you go for the HD video, which is stunning q

A few days ago I made a rare venture into watching BBC3 to see a rather odd little documentary called Gary: Young, Psychic and Possessed . (At the time of writing it's still on iPlayer here .) In it, the filmmaker, Emeka Onono tried to produce an open-minded study of the self-proclaimed psychic healer Gary Mannion. Watching, it was as fascinating for its revelations of the mind of the documentary maker as it was for the work of Mannion. Onono so wanted to believe. This came through particularly strongly when looking at two studies of Mannion. Onono portrayed the work of the (admittedly sometimes rather puerile) website Bad Psychics , which has a great swathe of evidence against Mannion as a personal attack, rather than the useful dissection it is. But when he visited a 'research' establishment that allegedly has some positive results for Mannion, he didn't point out that the Scottish Society for Psychical Research isn't exactly a proper academic institution.

I ventured out to our local Borders yesterday and encountered a bizarre phenomenon in the car park. That's the view of the car park on the right - it was packed. Forget recession, it was heaving. This car park has two disabled rows. One was reasonably in use. But take a look at the other one. There literally wasn't a single car in it. (It's not entirely obvious from the picture, but that's not just one row of spaces in front of the camera, there's another totally empty row to the left hand side of the roadway too.) I'm all in favour of disabled parking, but I can't help but feel they've got the balance a touch wrong here. Muttering about incompetent planners, I went into Borders only to be cheered up immensely by seeing the end of the popular science shelf. They've got taste in Borders:

I'm reading a book in black and white at the moment. Before you conclude that I've finally cracked under the strain and gone to pieces, because pretty well all books are in black and white, let me explain. I love old movies. But it takes a certain amount of patience to enjoy them. As soon as my kids see that a film is in black and white they give up. Usually with a movie of that period you have to make some allowances. Take one of my favourite films, It's a Wonderful Life - it is, without doubt, a great (if schmalzy) movie, but, to be brutally honest it's a bit slow in places. And, well, a trifle clunky. But that doesn't matter, as long as you approach it the right way. It's the same with this book, Gather Darkness by Fritz Leiber. It's a classic SF book, written in 1943. I can honestly say it doesn't feel as old as it is, but, yes, you do have to make allowances for the fact it's a 'black and white' book rather than a technicolor one. One

For a while I've wondered why my 10-year-old Nokia 7110 phone still looks pristine and shows no signs of giving up, where my children's phones are temperamental wrecks after one year. Admittedly, the 7110 is built like a warship (hey, but it does have that exciting pop open bit at the bottom over the keys, and a variant of it was used in the Matrix !) and the modern phones seem to be made of tissue paper. But it's not just that, it's the way they're treated. I look after my phone - they throw theirs around like hair straightners (which also die after a year, but that's a different story). On first thought I wondered if it was late adopter syndrome. You know the kind of thing. Most people my age are slightly hesitant with computers, because they weren't around when we were at school. This doesn't apply to me, because way back in 1984 I was programming PCs and they're now second nature. Mostly when someone asks me how to do something on a computer

I was slightly shocked to receive an email from a major publisher canvassing votes for one of their titles, which was entered for the Galaxy British Book Awards. This set of prizes seems to be the book equivalent of one of those 'people's choice' TV awards - the voting is done by the general public, and the shortlist is mostly celebrity vehicles or TV endorsed fiction. There was even a separate category just for the Richard & Judy bookclub selections. I suppose I shouldn't have been shocked by this attempt to drum up votes. There's a long tradition of advertising to encourage people to vote one way or another, and this was just direct email advertising. But somehow it doesn't seem the sort of thing book people do. Not us, you know? I duly clicked through and voted for a competitor to the book being pushed. As it happens both were from the same publisher (I'd be furious if I were the other person and found out that book A was being promoted above mine) -

I recently had an email from science journalist Angela Saini . We've never met, never spoken on the phone, never exchanged emails, yet each felt we knew the other slightly, as we had read each other's blog and posted comments on them. So, in a way, I feel like I know Angela, but we don't really know each other at all. I suppose there's a two dimensional spectrum of knowing at play here. At one end is your best mate, at the other that embarrassing kind of 'knowing' someone where you go up to them in a bar, and you say 'don't I know you from somewhere?', and they sigh and say 'I'm on TV.' But my initial example is a genuine two-way knowing from people who have had no real direct communication. With all the electronic media and social networking going on these days, I think we need a new word for this kind of indirect knowing someone. It could be to knowe someone (the 'e' at the end for electronic) or to kmow someone ('m' for

I'm not one one to be shy with electronic communication. I've got this blog and the website . I use Facebook and Twitter. I'm a member of two online websites for authors. But I just can't get the hang of FriendFeed . The estimable Maxine from Nature recommended it, and I've tried, I really have - but it just doesn't work for me. The idea is that it amalgamates all your feeds - Twitter, blogs, websites you like (I think) - all into one place. Seems reasonable. But then there are rooms for discussions on different topics, which can be sort of overlayed on your main feed. And people can comment and discuss any of these things - I just get lost. Part of the problem I have with FriendFeed is that I can't be bothered to go there. All the blogs I read (you can see the list down the bottom of the page) are automatically pulled together for me by Google Reader. I don't have to go anywhere to see these. I use iGoogle (the version of Google you can add widgets to)

I love Anglo Saxon writing. Part of its appeal is that it looks like a foreign language, yet if you read it aloud, much of it is intelligible. And I can spend hours poring over (admittedly in translation) the Anglo Saxon Chronicles. But the thing I think we really ought to revive from Anglo Saxon is the letter thorn. That's not a thorn for putting letters on, but the 27th letter of the alphabet, called thorn. I was reminded of this when there was a fuss on the news about the Icelandic bank, Kaupthing - because they use a thorn in their logo. It's the shape after the p in the picture. Thorn is a letter that's rendered as 'th'. Just think how often we use 'th' in English because of its thorny Anglo Saxon background. I'd love to bring it back. Þat's þe þing þat I'd like - it's a bit confusing to begin wiþ, but oþerwise fun!

A while ago I wrote (only partly tongue in cheek) about how important a dog was to a full time writer . On walks with the dog I get my best ideas, pull books mentally into shape - generally do much better thinking that sitting at my desk. I wanted to share one of my favourite dog walks, through the nearby village of Hinton Parva. I'm sorry this will be a bit of a long post as I couldn't decide which pictures to miss out. As we get on the edge of the village there's this wonderfully incongrous neighbourhood watch sign. There's not a building within 100 yards - I guess it's the cows and horses that are watching. This isn't flat territory - I love the rise and fall of the walk here on the edge of the chalk ridge of the Downs (which confusingly are upland). Heading down into the village. Apart from the wires, rather pretty. Most of the walk is on road, but it's the kind of road where you only meet a car once every 10 minutes or so. Tucked away just off the main

I'm very fond of the work of British (but resident in Portugal) artist Lucy Pepper. Her work is not unlike Posy Simmonds - I don't say that to make it sound derivative (it's not), but it has that same combination of use of spare, cartoon-like lines and funny insights into middle class angst. I bought one of her pictures last year (I don't buy art, but I just loved this one), and was delighted to discover that what I thought was a pastelish sort of painting thing was actually produced using a computer. Now Lucy is making use of the flexibility of the computer medium to produce what I think is verging on a new artform. It's a cartoon that is drawn as you watch (though speeded up) - so you see exactly how that elegant woman is created from a series of strokes. I find it hypnotic and fascinating. I think it's the ideal art to have on something like an iPhone or iPod Touch. You can find out more about Lucy and her work at her website . Here's the cartoon that got

A while ago I had an invitation to a dinner for former IT managers at British Airways. It would have been a lovely opportunity to meet up with former colleagues and find out what has happened to them in the years since I left the airline. But I didn't go. Why? Because they decided it would be 'fun' for the event to be black tie. Dinner jackets (tuxedos) and bow ties for the men, flash frocks for the women. When I was a student (and for a number of years after), I wore black tie at the drop of a hat, but these days, the concept repels me. I'd rather eat dog food. It's partly because I've abandoned that sign of corporate bondage, the tie altogether. When I started consulting for large companies I always wore a tie, because I thought it was expected. These days, it's almost the norm for consultants to turn up with no tie (quite possibly a suit, but no tie). I really can't see any reason for wearing those silly strips of cloth - doubly so for the ones tied

I have been to Chicago once. To be precise I flew through it, as a hub, enjoying (if that's the word) the most frightening landing I've ever experienced on a plane. We were a few minutes late and the (presumably ex fighter-) pilot up front was determined to make up time. He took us into such a steep angled turn that those on the right of the plane were looking directly downwards out of their windows. Passengers were screaming. Suddenly he snapped the plane horizontal. We landed, I kid you not, less than three seconds later. I was with a group of experienced airline staff, and every one of them was white as a sheet. So you might imagine my second approach to Chicago was with even more trepidation. But no. In fact I didn't even notice I'd been. This is because that estimable newspaper, the Chicago Sun-Times has kindly syndicated my contribution to Vulpes Libris on its website. That's what I call virtual travel.

I was in hospital this morning for a gastroscopy - nothing too worrying, just one of those camera and light thingies they put down your throat to make sure everything's in one piece. I'm pleased to report that it is. The most fascinating aspect is not the procedure itself but the sedation used in the process. It's the second time I've had it - and it's the weirdest feeling. Unlike a general anaesthetic there is no sense of slipping away. You are fully conscious as they inject the stuff, answering a couple of questions. And the last question is after the event, not before. You are conscious to some degree throughout, but there is just a slice cut out of your memory with nothing in between. It's so strange, but rather fascinating. I wouldn't recommend having a procedure requiring sedation just for the fun of it, but if you have one, enjoy!

Many years ago one of the mobile phone companies had a series of ads were famous-ish people said who they would like to have a one-to-one with and why. Inevitably their choices veered to the pretentious (no prizes for guessing Martin Luther King was one of them). Well, I'd like a one-to-one with Sir Paul McCartney. And what I'd like to ask is what was going through his mind when he allowed the phrase 'this world in which we live in,' into the theme song to the Bond movie Live and Let Die . I mean, world in which we live in ??? Every time I hear this, I want to cringe and simultaneously throw my shoes at the source of this illiterate guff. The really silly thing is that he could have left out either of those offending 'in's without spoiling the scansion, just by extending a word to a second note. So either 'wor-ld which we live in' or 'world in which we li-ive.' But no. So come, on Sir Paul. What's your excuse?

Our local commercial radio station, serving Wiltshire, is GWR FM. It has a strong local presence - a real feel of being part of the West - along with a striking black colour scheme. Unfortunately, every five minutes at the moment, they are proclaiming that they'll be Heart FM from 23 March. This is just stupid. Unlike GWR's strong West Country feel, Heart has a mushy Midlands persona. And if you associated any colour with it, it would be pink. Of course you can see the benefit from the radio company's point of view. It helps them save on costs. But benefits for the listener? None. Wiltshire's local radio becomes a part of a fuzzy Midlands mashup. And we aren't even in the Midlands. Time to switch to BBC Radio Wiltshire, I think. (In all honesty, I usually listen to BBC Radio 4 anyway - but the kids like GWR.)

I love my big, shiny, black, rather menacing Dell with its elegant flat screens and enough processing power to run NORAD - but sometimes it's useful to remember that writing isn't really about having a whizzy computer. I wrote my first few books on one of these. It was IBM's first truly portable computer (it was too much like a part of a tank to really be called a laptop). Those two 3.5 inch diskette drives were it as far as disk storage went. No hard disk. One had the operating system, the other the word processing software and you saved your files on any space left. I can't remember exactly how many lines of text you got on the screen - about 10 I think. And that screen was rubbish. But it did the job. It wasn't the first PC I used - I'd worked on both at XT and an AT at work (the latter was only the second of these in the UK), which had hard disks, though admittedly only 10 Mb or thereabouts. But the 'portable' PC was enough for my book writing.

An enjoyable excursion to north London today to speak at Parliament Hill School (nowhere near the houses of parliament). It's a girls' technology college, which I suspect is quite uncommon. For someone whose journey to work is normally walking down the corridor, it's actually quite exciting to be setting off at 6am for a commute into London. I'd hate it every day, but it's rather a pleasant change occasionally. The year 11s were a brilliant audience, and the reception was excellent. The only problem was a common one with schools. When I do a real world lecture, I'm often in the room up to an hour beforehand, checking the visuals are okay, making sure everything is fine and leaving nothing to chance. In a school it's often a bit different. I arrived in the room 1 minute before the event - to discover there was no screen, projector or computer. A moment or two feeling slightly panicky followed, as the presentation is essential for this particular talk. T

The night before last I was in our local council chamber, watching the planning committee in action. I was there to support some friends who had the last of a whole string of planning applications up that night. If this one went through, it would give them permanent permission to operate their business - microlighting and skydiving from a delightful Wiltshire location . They have had huge trouble from a very small bunch of protestors, who totally fail to represent local opinion in the village, but who have continued to find every excuse to hold up and disrupt the process. Tonight was the bad guys' last chance to torpedo things - so it was almost an anti-climax when the whole thing went through with no opposition. However, it was truly fascinating to see local democracy in action. If you've never attended a local government session, I'd strongly recommend it. After all, these people are making decisions that will have a direct impact on your life. I don't know if all

The International Climate Congress in Copenhagen this week has stepped up the pressure on those who want to pretend that climate change doesn't exist. Despite the mockery that has been aimed at those predicting sea level rise in the past, we now hear of catastrophic rises of 1 metre or more by the end of the century. It seems it is now 'almost impossible' to restrict temperature rises this century to two degrees - itself a target that would cause significant problems in many countries. Figures as high as six degrees have been bandied about. This would truly be devastating - see Mark Lynas ' book on the subject . And the increase of carbon dioxide dissolved in the seas giving extra acidity is threatening to endanger many aquatic species. The repeated message is 'things are worse than we thought they were.' Those who complain about the accuracy of climate models rarely seem to notice that when they are inaccurate they almost always err on the side of ca

If the title sounds more like something from Heat magazine, apologies. When not hard at work writing the next book, I run our village choir. I soon discovered that one of their favourite composers was someone I’d never heard of in a couple of decades of singing – a man called Caleb Simper (what a name). To be honest, it’s really not my kind of music – seriously Victorian. I particularly like Vaughan Williams’ comment about Simper and his contemporary Maunder: Composers with ridiculous names: their names are about the one thing these composers couldn’t help; other aspects of their activities are less innocent. However, we were going to perform a Simper piece and I wanted some programme notes, so looked him up on the web, only to find there was practically nothing about him there. He wasn’t in Groves, the ultimate musical dictionary, either. Now you might think ‘not surprising with some obscure guy’, but in his day, Simper was the equivalent of Andrew Lloyd Webber. He had over 5

I don't share the views of those who moan and groan about Facebook eroding this, that and the other - and probably causing your mind to rot as well. If people spend hours a day on it, yes they should get a life, but a quick pop into it on occasion is good fun. Facebook is particularly useful if, like me, you spend much of your working day alone. It gives a little sense of community as and when you want it. But I've a real dilemma about how to use it. When I first went on Facebook, it was at the encouragement of the publicity person for a publisher. She saw it purely as another way to get exposure. 'Want to build up friends fast?' she said. 'Ask PR people. They'll be friends with anyone.' (Sorry, PR people, but it wasn't me who said it.) In that mode of operation, you accept friendship offers from anyone, because it's all about getting the biggest number of friends so you can use it as a PR vehicle. But the problem with this approach is that the infor

I did a signing of Ecologic yesterday at our local Borders . They had done a great job, producing some excellent posters and a brilliant signing position with the sort of display of books you'd normally only expect for a big name. All in all, it was a good experience. There are two types of book signing. There's the signing by the celebrity author, with a queue of people out the door, and there's the signing by the ordinary author like me, where most of the time there's no one at your table. One of my customers (yes, I did have some) asked me if it wasn't dispiriting sitting there on my own with no one coming up. In fact, it wasn't. (Or at least it wasn't for me.) It had a rather similar appeal to that I'm told fishing has for many. It was a chance to sit and contemplate, to watch the world go by. I sat there for four hours, and it really was fascinating, just watching what people do in a bookshop. But there were more parallels than that. I started spott

We often see around our village, delivering to one or other of the pubs, a van from a company that sells cheese. The company is called Bermic. Now I'm sure they're a very good company - from their website , it looks like they sell some really excellent regional cheeses. They even sell cheese wedding cakes . No really. That's one on the right with the wonderous Cornish Yarg on top: But I can't help but think they made a mistake with the name. The chances are it's one of those first name combos. Bernard and Michael or Bernice and Michael or some such. But for me, the name 'Bermic' immediately brings lavatory disinfectant blocks to mind. I'm not sure quite why - perhaps it's because it has a similar feel to Harpic - but that image springs to mind every time I see the van. And, frankly, that's not a good association for cheese. So next time you're naming a company, give a little thought to the feel of the name. It can't do any harm, can it?

Pulp fact, even. I happened to be in a bookshop the other day with a senior editor from one of the big publishers. I was looking at one of the books on the shelves, which hadn't just got a few handling marks - it was seriously browser-battered. Knowing that bookshops can send books back and get their money refunded, I asked if the publisher even paid them for books that so obviously couldn't be reused. The response was a bit of a surprise to me. In principle, I was told, the publisher could refuse to refund a book that was in a really bad condition. But in the end, the chances are they would all be pulped, so it didn't matter. Returns weren't usually sent back out. I suppose I imagined craftspersons in the warehouse, carefully restoring returned books to the piles waiting to go out. Giving them a quick polish with a chamois leather before they lovingly restored them to stock. But, no, it's heave-ho into the mashing machine. Perhaps it's just me, but this seems a

In my imagination I know just what the accounting department of a publisher looks like. All Victorian-style tall desks, quill pens and hunched accountants scribbling away in vast, dusty tomes. Surely it can't be any other way? Why do I say this? Because in our up-to-the-minute, instant-electronic-transfers-of-cash, point-of-sale-information-system world, publishers pay their authors' royalties only every six months, and that can be 9 or 10 months after the cash was earned. And that's if you're lucky. Over the last few years, some publishers have worked hard to get royalties paid annually instead. In case there's any confusion over how authors get paid, the normal process is like this. Up front they get an advance, which can range from zero (often with academic publishers) to a lot. They probably average about £2,000. Once the book starts to sell, the author's earnings from each sale (typically around 50p per book), starts to offset that advance. When the advance

'There are lies, damned lies and statistics,' said Mark Twain, apparently quoting Disraeli, though no one seems sure what his source was. For a long time I found this dislike of statistics hard to grasp. Coming from a physics and operational research background, statistics was an essential tool for understanding large groups in action. It was the only way to handle many, many issues. Yet now I do understand this. It's not a problem of statistics, it's a problem of the combination of statistics and either the media or politicians. In a recent piece in the Times , David Aaronovich calls into question the much bandied about statistic that in Britain today, the average person is caught on CCTV 300 times a day. After a bit of detective work, he tracked this down to a book, where the number was used to describe a day in the life of a fictional person who has a very unusual day that conveniently takes him in front of many more cameras than the average person encounters. There

I was delighted to be invited to appear on literary agent Peter Cox 's podcast Litopia Daily to talk about Ecologic . I must admit, when I was asked, I thought it would just be one day, but I've been roped in for the whole week, so regular listeners will have to cope with my ramblings all the way through to Friday. When I first heard about such podcasts, I was a bit uncertain. I like listening to speech radio when I'm in the car, but I couldn't envisage ever taking the time to listen to something like this - a daily (well, weekdays) broadcast on writing and writers. Since then I've started listening, and it is rather addictive. I gather it (I'm not sure if it's the daily podcast or the Friday evening Litopia After Dark ) now has significantly more listeners* than Richard and Judy's current TV show has viewers. (For non-UK readers, R&J were once the doyens of UK daytime TV, but moved to an early evening slot on a digital channel to see viewing figure