Diary – 12 November 2005

There was a surreal touch to last Sunday’s newspapers. The inside sections, which tend to be prepared a little in advance, brimmed, as usual, with pieces about the delights of living in France. The news pages, by contrast, carried pictures of French youths lobbing Molotov cocktails and overturning cars in the great orgy of rage that has overtaken the country in recent days. Cars seem to have had the worst of it. In the truest French bureaucratic traditions, somebody has even been keeping a countrywide tally of those destroyed: by Monday night the toll had reached 1,408 vehicles. On the same day a different news story caught my eye — that new car sales are plummeting across Europe — and a terrible thought occurred to me: is somebody deliberately trying to boost an ailing industry which once symbolised French industrial pride? If I were on the board of Renault, I would certainly be lifting a glass to these latter-day Jacobins.

In these pages two weeks ago Charles Moore recounted the story of George Courtauld who, having had his idea for The Pocket Book of Patriotism rejected by several publishers, published it himself — and in one weekend sold 37,500 copies through his website. The story perked me up because on 1 December I am publishing my own satirical novel, The Great Before. It is difficult to know whether it will work, or result in professional suicide. Some fellow writers have been encouraging, while one or two others have made a predictable remark: ‘So you’re vanity publishing, are you?’ — effectively bracketing me with Saddam Hussein, who in his later years as President of Iraq relieved the boredom of dictating by penning the odd love story about young maidens falling for his charms. In as much as all careers, other than, perhaps, that of a Carthusian monk, involve an element of vanity, perhaps they have a point.