Diary

Mumbai A city where the children dash from car to car selling novels is the perfect place for a literary festival: on the way from the airport, snaking past shantytowns and catching my first glimpse of the Arabian Sea, I am offered The Kite Runner by street urchins knocking on the window of my taxi. It is a good location for another reason, which is that, like New York or Rome, Mumbai is a place one visits in literature and film many times before setting foot on the island city itself. In its crush of people, colour, sensuality, surrealism and politics, it is Midnight’s Children or a Bollywood double-bill suddenly made flesh. I am here to talk about British politics and fiction, doing my best not to confuse the two. A few days before departure, I see the PM at No.

We woke up early on Oscar morning to see the hills of Hollywood wreathed in fog, clouds and spitting rain. I shivered in the unseasonable freezing weather. ‘Should be fun on the red carpet this afternoon,’ I said to Percy. Turning on E! channel at 10 a.m. we watched presenters and starlets in strapless gown with goose-pimpled arms talking to various purveyors of footwear and jewels to the stars. Then some young chefs suggested what they would have served at the Governor’s Ball after the event if Wolfgang Puck (the Austrian celebrity chef) hadn’t made the cut.

Carla Powell on the joys of the internet and the politics of Italy I am a late convert to the internet, but it has changed my life. I can sit here in my little farm in the Roman countryside and cultivate my olives — or, to be truthful, watch Dario the farm manager cultivate my olives — while keeping up with the world’s press, receiving photos of my newest granddaughter in Hong Kong and bombarding my friends with mis-spelled emails. Who needs the hassle of the big city, congestion charging, airport security or a social life? I can live my rural idyll while still feeling a part of what’s happening in the world beyond — enough anyway to sign off my emails ‘Carla (not Bruni)’. Italy is heading towards elections in April.

This week I have been prey to a prolonged bout of insomnia induced, I suspect, by the fact that I stay up to watch the BBC’s Ten O’Clock News followed by Newsnight and, invariably, one or the other contains an item which so disturbs me that my brain continues churning into the small hours. Despair at the way the country now seems to be heading lies just below the surface of our everyday lives like the herpes simplex virus, ready to erupt at any given moment. For insomniacs it is always 3 o’clock in the morning, as Scott Fitzgerald put it at his most manic, and I finally resort to breaking a 10mg Temazepam tablet in half and then have a panic wondering if this is the start of a new addiction (I gave up a lifelong love of cigarettes two years, two months and five days ago).

David Tang reflects on the storms in China, and on being 'Googled' My daughter telephoned to say, to my disbelief, that she was snowbound in Hangzhou, where it never snows. The city is regarded as the most beautiful in China, with swaying willows surrounding an old lagoon on the edge of which Mao Tse-tung loved staying. I always asked for the same bedroom that Mao chose at the West Lake Guesthouse — until one night in the same bed that he slept, I saw, standing by the window, a ghostly figure of a woman in white. It wasn’t quite Wilkie Collins, but enough to put me off ever returning. My daughter will probably never return to Hangzhou either, as she was stuck there for three days and spent 20 hours queuing at the airport which couldn’t cope with the snow.

As publication of my new novel, My Favourite Wife, draws closer, Fred Kindall steps up the training. You need to be a fit man to publish a novel these days. ‘It’s good to be alive,’ Fred exults, as I lie on the floor of his gym and he bounces a black medicine ball on my abdominal muscles. ‘You’re so lucky to be training,’ he screams, his favourite catchphrase. Fred is a boxer and so going to the gym no longer means sitting around watching Pimp My Ride on MTV. A boxer doesn’t exercise. He trains. The excess weight produced by your soft, affluent life just melts away in the presence of Fred. Every time he bawls in my face about how lucky I am to be training, I feel another couple of pounds drop away.

It’s said that vampires suffer from a syndrome called arithmomania or an obsessive love of counting, so much so that to escape a vampire you just need to throw loads of cloves of garlic on the floor and the vampire can’t resist counting them, allowing you to make a hasty exit. It was this obsession with counting that inspired my favourite Muppet character, the vampire Count von Count. But I’m actually not in Transylvania to track down vampires but another local inhabitant who was obsessed with mathematics: János Bolyai. At the age of 21 this brilliant mathematician discovered that Euclid’s geometry was not the only possible geometry.

In the month of back to basics, I no longer hanker for parties or cut-price cashmere, just the long, deep bath of my dreams. We spent New Year with friends in Cameron country: lovely Oxfordshire farmhouses, big fires and buttock-honing walks. My husband emerged glowing from his bath and said very sweetly that he would run me a fresh one. Nooooo! Any fule kno you never get more than one tankful at a time in a country house, however well appointed. But he is a city boy so I said, ‘Thank you, darling,’ raced for the plug and sat in the remaining five inches, covered in gooseflesh from the navel upwards. Now I leaf through boiler brochures in a manner which verges on the pornographic.

Years ago my divorce liberated me from many things, not least of which was a wife’s burden of organising the traditional family Christmas. Inevitably, come Boxing Day, I was whey-faced with fatigue and singularly lacking in ‘ho-ho-ho’. Subsequent Christmases have been spent in far-flung places and this year I have just returned from visiting Tamil Nadu and its myriad temples. Getting to grips with Indian gods is not easy. There are over 3,000 of them. But on this visit I came across a particularly fascinating one — Ardhanareshwara. It seems the god Siva in one of his earliest incarnations declared man and woman were equal, so Ardhanareshwara was given the human form of half man, half woman. Grotesque as it may sound, the figure is really very beautiful.

Last night I came face to face with a pair of Victoria Beckham’s old white jeans. To be fair, it wasn’t just me and the jeans. It was more of a charity auction do where her trousers were up for grabs. I had a good look at them. But then came a slight panicky moment when my arm got stuck in the leg and I feared they might have to call security to release me. It has been that sort of week, really. A lot crammed into a smallish space. On Monday I dashed from the Policy Exchange Christmas party to the re-re-re-relaunch of Duran Duran. In the seats behind us were Bob Geldof and Tara Palmer-Tomkinson, which safely gets my Weird Pairing of the Week award. It was groupie heaven, crowned with a kiss from Simon Le Bon. My cheek is now on eBay.

Sunday Weekend duty totally ruined by silly Sayeeda’s trip to Sudan. Spent all day yesterday fielding calls for pre-trip interviews, but she couldn’t do any of them because she had an urgent appointment at Daniel Galvin for a cut and blow dry before she went to the airport. Dave and Mr Hague think it’s all v bad idea and will go horribly wrong on account of her uncanny knack of saying exactly the wrong thing at precisely the wrong time. Jed declared at one point it would have been better to send Mr Hague and let him ‘bore Bashir rigid about how Islam is just like Judo’. Monday The row has reached Wibberley! Busy Bees nursery displaying a Mickey Mouse called Mohammed in its front window.

Monday Am worried and confused. Just back from Forward Planning Meeting and whole of Grid for next three months is choc-a-bloc with extremely scary stuff. Clampdowns on everything from malingering benefit claimants to selfish single mums. New catchphrases include: ‘Prison Works’, ‘On Your Bike!’ and ‘Women! Know your working limits!’ Nothing about the environment. Not a mention of my idea for an ethical Xmas gifts campaign based around Dave visiting Malawi to present a desperate family with a goat on behalf of each modernising participant. Only thing that was even remotely compassionate was clampdown on multi-faith nativity plays. And that was only a bit nice because we are going to ‘bring back Jesus in a manger’.