Low life | 14 April 2016

On Monday morning I was in a blind panic. The deadline for posted manuscript entries to the Daily Mail First Novel competition is 1730 GMT on Saturday 16 April. But I was in France again. A letter sent from France to Blighty takes between three days and a week. Therefore I had to get my entry — 5,000 words in 12 point Times New Roman, double-spaced, and a 600-word synopsis of the rest — posted by midday at the absolute latest. The winner gets £20,000 and a book deal if he or she can faithfully promise to deliver the finished novel by 31 October. On Monday morning my problems were threefold: the printer had run out of bloody ink; I couldn’t work out how to change my page format from single- to double-spaced; and I couldn’t find a paper clip.

I know these are insignificant problems. And I know that my chances of winning are probably about the same as being murdered in my bed by the Archbishop of Canterbury acting under the malign influence of a recessive gene. All the same, my eyeball-popping frustration with the Hewlett-Packard inkjet printer and with the Pages word-processing application made me lose all sense of proportion. In spite of a less than zero chance of winning, I had of course in my mind’s eye already spent the prize money on half-decent cocaine and women of negotiable affections in exotic locations, so missing the deadline would mean, in effect, that I would be £20,000 worse off.

And, this being France, the town’s post office would probably be shut until further notice to enable the state employees to travel down to Marseilles to throw cobble stones at the police in support of their demand for a one-hour working week.