With only a couple of weeks left in the UK before going off to America, I’m feeling a little weird. First, because I haven’t even been to America since I was pregnant with Nicholas, so ten years ago. (Am I going to go around exclaiming at the prices of Hershey bars and Levi’s, telling everyone how they were less than half that price last I saw – in which case I’ll have turned into my grandmother?)

The other thing is that I haven’t been away from home for more than a few days in the past ten years. We’ve been to the beach in Wales, a camping trip, a week in Norway, a quick trip to France and back, usually only for a few days. But now we’re talking about me being away for a month and the truth is, I like to be at home. I like our routines, how I have to get up and throw hay to the horses each morning, break the ice in the water trough, see whether my various rat barricades have kept the bastards out of the feed. I like my shiftless, lazy cats, the stacks of books by my bedside, that same old view out the window.

 My sister once told me I was like some old lady who was afraid of leaving her apartment. “I am not afraid,” I said. “I’m just content.”

Oddly, once I actually leave to go somewhere I am absolutely fine. As long as there are no great catastrophes at home I am able to travel quite happily, sometimes for long periods. I have often been driving down the highway and felt this urge to just keep going. Here in Britain they have roads signs that say “To The North” with a fat arrow, and I’ve felt the urge to just go that way, presumably until I ran out of fuel or fell into the North Sea.

For a couple of weeks I’ll have my family with me and that will be great. Nicholas wants to visit every state in America, or at least several of them. Imogen wishes to decamp at the nearest theme park and spend her days luxuriating in chocolate and frequent roller coaster rides. I want a hot bath and dinner – which I really could get at home of course – but rarely do as like all homes, mine is run by the constant attention of a woman, that is, me. So it will be good to get away (I guess) although perhaps even better to come home.

But I have to say that, for me, there is nothing so wonderful as reading fiction. I know the thing is invented and yet I feel as though I’ve entered into a world as real as the one around me and usually a lot more interesting. It seems extraordinary to me that stories of great magnitude can be entirely invented, and that characters who stay with me for a lifetime have their origin in the mind of person who I have never met. And yet, this is absolutely the case.

It can be thrilling. There are occasions when I find myself having to type faster and faster just to keep up with my characters. I have slow days, too, when they all behave like couch potatoes and nobody in the book does or says anything worth pressing the “Save” key for. On a good day I watch the storyline develop, not even knowing where I am going until I see it on the page. On a bad day I read other writer’s work, hoping that by entering their novels I will trip myself back into the world I am trying to establish in my own.

Fiction is an exercise of imagination that requires you to believe it even as you make it up. It is not “real”, no but it is because the writer is not bound by reality nor responsible for the facts, that they often produce their “truest” work in the form of novels or short stories.

This weekend I read a wonderful article in the New York Times by a fiction writer named Julia Glass. The link is below, but here is a quote from her thoughtful piece:

“Fiction writers work tremendously hard to make things that patently untrue seem as true as possible. ‘Let me tell you a story that isn’t true,’ beckons a fiction writer, ‘and I will show you some of the truest things you’ll ever know.’ A good novel is an out-of-self experience. It lifts you off the ground so that you have the sensation of flying. It says, Look at the world around you; learn from the people in these pages, neither quite me nor quite you, how life is lived in so many different ways.”

I think that is right, just as she put it. I read her lovely piece and I felt good about being a writer of fiction. If you would like to read the piece in its entirety, the link is below:

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/11/opinion/11glass.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

But let’s not bitch about my village. Let’s bitch about the village down the road. I live near a place called Thatcham, which is actually a nice enough place (even if my husband drives several miles out of his way to avoid it). Nice but not perfect, which is why I am stumped by the Thatcham Police Station.

It would appear that the Thatcham Police Station is not a police station at all, but an empty building. There is a sign outside but no actual police inside. Thieves could enter and leave a note saying ‘I was here, where were you?’ There are large signs outside the car park saying NO PARKING! VIOLATORS WILL BE PROSECUTED. I think not. In fact, I have now taken to parking my car at the Thatcham Police Station as it is most certainly a police-free zone.

You might ask how I know all this. I know this because I recently visited the Thatcham Police Station, or at least the grounds of the police station, in order to alert them that the nearby petrol station was selling hard-core porn on DVD’s in full view at children’s eye level. I thought they would want to know that.

However, I was greeted with a locked door with a bright yellow phone beside it. I picked up the phone. The person on the phone told me I was now speaking to the police department in a whole other county hundreds of miles away. They were not so interested in the porn I wanted to report.

With no police available, I took matters into my own hands. I went back to the petrol station and told the manager that it wasn’t right for hard-core porn to be sitting on the shelves next to the Disney Magazine. Surely, he could understand.

He could not understand. I told him I couldn’t even bring my daughter into the shop because of all the hard-core porn. His response was something along the lines of that it didn’t matter to him, but worded more strongly.

The remarkable thing about living in an English village is not how weird everyone is, it is how weird everyone becomes. I am willing to bet there used to be police in that building but that something in the water caused them to go strange and wander off, like demented cattle – which we also have around here.

All of which brings me to say thank you to the Reading Group in Bracknell, Berkshire who invited me along to talk to them about my upcoming book Daniel Isn’t Talking, for which they had a preview. I really enjoyed myself and would love to visit again some day.

If you are part of a Reading Group, drop in a comment and tell me who you are and what you are reading. There is nothing so infectious as another’s enthusiasm for a book and I would love to know what you are enjoying.

But I’m not going to talk about the boxes – though they are extraordinary, it is true, and totally marketable except that she doesn’t want to sell any of them. They are created; they are named; they are not (yet) exhibited, although that is coming -- but they are not for sale.

Okay, forget the boxes. I wanted to talk about how Whitney’s car was recently stolen. The other great thing about having friends who are writers is that bizarre things seem to happen to them. It is perhaps this tendency to attract the weirdness of life – a condition with which I am definitely afflicted – that shapes us into writers to begin with.

Okay, admittedly, it is not that weird to have a car stolen. Once, when my husband and I lived in southeast London, someone tried to steal our car ,while we were still in it. Another time, I got into a taxi driven by a psycho who stopped at a red light, pulled out a baseball bat and attacked another taxi with the bat, before gettingback into the cab and driving off now that the light was green. Another time, I hit a car because I ran a stop sign and the guy got out, screamed at me in a language I didn’t understand, then got back in his car and drove off, forgetting to take my insurance details. What was I supposed to do, chase him? Stuff happens in cars – it is true.

In Whitney’s case, the car was stolen in broad daylight while her husband was standing at the door. Her husband, seeing the thieves take off with their car, grabbed a set of keys to another car and chased them. Now we all know that not even actors do their own car chase scenes (way too dangerous) and that ordinary men of America do not hunt down thieves. But Whitney watched as first her car took off at the speed of sound, and then her husband after it in their other car. So now she had no cars. Or husband. And this happened…you know…suddenly.

What did she do? Well, she called 911. What did they tell her to do? They told her to call her husband on his mobile phone and ask him to come home. That was their great advice.

Whitney explained that when he had run out the door to chase the thieves, he hadn’t had time to make sure he had his phone with him. The police said, Oh, that’s too bad because it’s dangerous to chase car thieves.

Oh really? Like she didn’t know.

But the good news is that Whitney’s husband is a little unusual. Not “unusual” like he can’t hold a job. Not “unusual” like he has all his deceased pets stuffed. That kind of unusual is limited pretty much to my immediate family. No, this is unusual in a good way, a sane way, a calm way.

Apparently, he only chased the thieves because he wanted to know where car thieves go with their stolen property. As a matter of interest, you understand.

Or you are thinking, oh no, here comes some sort of nauseating “spiritual” lecture on how we ought to celebrate the small things in life…the colour of the sweet red rose, how the sun rises each day, even the fuzz on our own sweaters.

But no, this really is news – my son can skate and really nobody can imagine that this child would ever get on an ice rink. Here’s why:

1. He’s autistic and he likes order. Order just doesn’t happen on an ice rink. An ice rink is chaos. In fact, a nice definition of chaos is a city ice rink during school holidays. It’s madness. Some of the teenagers were going so fast I think I saw them blur.
2. Nicholas doesn’t like loud noises and this particular ice rink plays disco music, sends coloured lights across the floor, and the whole thing echoes under the great dome of the building. When I say Nicholas hates loud noises, he can barely tolerate a hand dryer in a public restroom – that’s how bad it is! And yet, he went boogying around with the other kids…amazing.
3. Like many autistic people, my son is uncoordinated, has hypotonia (which means his joints are unusually loose) and can’t even walk correctly – so how on earth would anyone expect him to skate? But he can! He can!
4. Nicholas hates to fall down, get hurt, or watch anyone else fall down or get hurt. And yet he did fall down (though he wasn’t hurt) and then got up and skated without so much as a whimper!

So, I am celebrating. Anyone who has an autistic child will probably be smiling as they read this, knowing what it is like to be delighted by such a seemingly small achievement. At three years old Nicholas had no language, no eye contact, no play skills. At 9 years old he is skating around saying, “I am a power skater.” How about that? Raise a glass!

One year – when I was single and childless – I ignored Christmas trees, parties, presents and cards, and took off for the Florida Keys. I don’t remember much about Christmas except being warm and swimming in the ocean, and feeling a little like a someone who has escaped a mildly unpleasant procedure like dental surgery.

Another time I informed the university admin people that I wasn’t going to vacate my dorm room for Christmas. This was when I was an undergraduate. They assumed my refusal to leave was due to financial reasons and offered to apply for grant money on my behalf so I could spend Christmas in a nice place. “But this is nice,” I told them. “I like it here.” I almost got away with it that year but someone – I can’t remember who – got a hold of me at the last minute and made me go to their house. It might have been my mother.

The only other near-escape was when my husband and I scheduled a trip to Prague together. But then he re-scheduled it for Boxing Day so as not to disappoint his parents. I was so cross. I might have divorced him on the spot but then who would I go to Prague with?

These days it is impossible to avoid Christmas, of course. My children are involved in countless Christmas events so they’ve learned to have expectations over it – a tree, mince pies, tinsel. It pains me – they know this – but they conspire together to make me deal with Christmas despite all my objections. And because I would do anything for them – paint myself green and stand in the corner so they could decorate me if that is what they wished – we have a floor to ceiling Christmas tree taking up the whole of the living room, plus wreaths and holly and tinsel and….dare I say it… outdoor house lights.

The worst part (I can barely bring myself to admit) is that despite telling my children from day one that there is no such thing as Santa Claus and that he is a marketing invention designed to sell more toys, they insist this is not the case. “He’s real,” says my eleven year old daughter just to wind me up. “He comes down the chimney!”

And then she goes off to bake him cookies while my son fishes in the refrigerator for carrots for the reindeer.