Just back from London, where we saw the Monty Python musical (great fun, though Peter Davison doesn’t have much of a singing voice) and David Hare’s latest play, ‘The Vertical Hour’ at the Royal Court. This is worth catching, with strong performances from the three leads, although it was hard to credit the sexual tension needed between Anton Lesser and Indira Varma who’s more than a decade younger than Julianne Moore, who played the part on Broadway, and this weakens the play, as do the didactic bookends. Like Hare, I was against the invasion of Iraq, but a play’s far more dramatically effective if the arguments are balanced, leaving us to make up our own minds. Instead, he seemed to be writing it for a…

I forgot to say that the photos above and below were taken by Georgina Lock, those of the panel by Tessa Hadley and the one at the bottom by a nice guy on Lenox who saw me taking a picture of Georgina and offered to take one of the two of us together. Thanks to all three.

David Mamet’s ‘November’ is the lightest thing he’s done in years, and the funniest. We strolled through heavy rain to get there and found that, while the expensive seats in the beautiful Ethel Barrymore Theater were full, the cheaper ones upstairs weren’t, so we were able to move from the back of the gallery to the front when the lights went down. It’s a comedy featuring Nathan Lane as a corrupt US president who’s about to fail to be reelected for a second term, with Dylan Baker as his adviser and Laurie Metcalf as his scriptwriter. More farce than satire, it’s a surprisingly bubbly, infectious piece of work and combined with the dance party that followed, was a great way to start the weekend. We…

After a breakfast bagel at Pax Wholefoods, down 7th Avenue, I headed for the program directors plenary, which was compulsory, but also standing room only and not aimed at UK Creative Writing MA Programme leaders, so instead I hurried over to downstairs at the Sheraton, where I was in time for most of the first speaker of a fascinating panel about the problems of being a transatlantic writer. Then I went to the ‘Queering New York’ panel, primarily because I wanted to hear Ed White, only he wasn’t there, but it was pretty entertaining all the same. The midday panel on my area, Young Adult Fiction, was outstanding. Mary Rockcastle chaired a discussion about the line between Young Adult, Crossover and Adult fiction with Caryoln…

At half past one, US time, yesterday morning, five hours after we were meant to be in the air, I thought I might not be here now. Earlier, just as we were about to take off, a warning light had come on in the cockpit, and the engineers couldn’t locate the problem. They’d stripped, then rebuilt the engine and were about to test it. ‘We’re going to give it a try,’ the pilot said. ‘And if it works, we’ll be leaving in 45 minutes. Otherwise, we’re not going anywhere tonight.’ The rest you can work out. Earlier in the day, Georgina and I went shopping (like the hat?) then took the subway to Harlem, where we walked round for a while in the glorious winter…