It remains
the single most vital piece of advice I have ever been given by another writer.
It was imparted by the matchless Joan Didion during an interview for YOU
Magazine in San Francisco, mid-Eighties, when I was but a blade of grass in the
lawn beneath the steeples of her Hemingway-inspired prose. Situation unchanged.
Lunch is
time's thief, tearing scribes from their desks, luring motivation into the
recesses of mid-day indulgence, and discarding it
there with a sneer. Lunch divides the day, making a mockery of a morning's toil
and rendering useless the flimsy hours thereafter. It is one of the reasons why
I have long collected the better excuses for the cancellation of lunches I
should never have committed to in the first place. Today's is a blinder and has
been logged for future use. Do you think I'd get away with it?
'I've just
returned from a holiday learning to kitesurf,' imparted the intended lunch
date, 'and I have to see a doctor about my injuries. Call it a midlife crisis.'
Though secretly delighted that an uninterrupted day of work now stretches
before me - I'm ghostwriting a huge memoir for a formidable client - I couldn't
help but wonder. Last year, my friend took up kayaking, and raised a tidy sum
for charity - in the name of a friend's little boy who had recently died from a
rare disease. Now kitesurfing. My initial thought being, for whatever reason,
he is working his way through sports beginning with K. But Kabaddi and Karate
fall before Kayaking in the alphabet, Kickball and Kickboxing precede
Kitesurfing, and for the life of me I cannot imagine my friend, athletic and
appealing for a fifty-something though he is, attempting Ken-Do, Knife-Throwing
or Kung-Fu ...
He suggested
further dates that I simply cannot commit to. Because Writers Don't Do Lunch.
And anyway, would he still be alive? Would he have resisted the urge to hurtle
on mindlessly through the sporting alphabet to the most life-threatening
pursuits of our race's most gnashing dare-devils? Might he even, as we speak,
be preparing to launch himself from Pyeongchang's mighty peaks in an attempt to
confound the achievements of Eddie 'the Eagle' Edwards?
For the
record, cocktails at around 5.30pm is the preferred slot. I usually feel
deserving of a couple by then. On dry, sea-levellish land, with reasonable
access to conventional forms of transport and a comprehensive beverage menu to
hand. Soho is obvious.