Russell Hoban topped up my anti-freeze last night

More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

17 February

Other people will tell you things like this, which, I agree, you may find unlikely:

Samuel Beckettt cleaned and polished my windscreen two days ago


However, what I have gathered through a mate of mine in the trade (he owns GY Motors) is that those who, on our view of things, appear to have died during their literary career (such as Russ Hoban last year) have instead really just no longer found themselves drawn as they always were to everything about writing.

Yes, they may still be found, over coffee, reading a column or two in The London Review of Books, but what energizes them now is no longer producing and spreading their writing. We have misinterpreted as their death the greater pleasure that they take in doing, as a favour for someone else, that little thing that keeps being forgotten about:

The one that niggles every time the driver is about to get into the car, and, again, there isn't time to do it and be in Northampton on time


That recurrence of need is what these working on our cars seek to remedy - that needless feeling of being screwed up that the wiper-blades still haven't been cleaned, or the washer-bottle filled.

My contact tells me that he can't be any more specific than that, but that this pattern is what he has gathered from Tweets that he has seen.

He doesn't know whether it's just novelists (and, as he says, Stevie Smith wrote a novel, so who is a novelist?), but he says that it's clearly just minimal maintenance jobs, so don't expect Thomas Hardy to do your 12,000-mile service, or you'll have a long wait!


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