1 January 2024:
Last night I attended the famous HarperCollins New Year’s Eve Literary Soirée. It was held at London’s Soho House and was a veritable ‘who’s what’ of UK literati. I met too many famous authors to mention, though a few interactions stand out in the mind. Among the guests was Ian McEwan, one of my favourite authors. I was finally able to put to him a question I had wanted to ask for years: did he realise that there was a potential double meaning to the title Enduring Love – that it could mean both ‘love that endures’, and ‘love that is endured’? He had no idea! Less pleasant was Margaret Atwood, who had clearly drunk one too many cranberry whiskey sours. As soon as I entered the soirée she slurred, ‘You’re the one who wrote that awful spy novel, aren’t you?’, and I later discovered it was she who started the rumour—which somehow spread around the entire soirée—that I did not know how to use a semicolon. Towards the end of the night; I saw her being removed by security aft…
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