Vanity fair and foul

The plumber came this morning — £75 including VAT. He was still expensively engaged when a bike brought Frederic Raphael’s Rough Copy in a paperback version whose glued spine is in constant contest with the reader. Anyway, surely an opportunity to recoup the plumber’s fee. Strangely, the author himself raises the question of my financial plight on page 164 — I was into the index in a flash — when he disobligingly records that in 1973 I had ‘no income whatsoever’, despite mouths to feed.