Halfway home

I didn't realise till this weekend what a shite hole Heathrow Terminal 5 was. A shiny, shiny new shite hole. Though I suppose I shouldn't complain, I did actually make it home with all my luggage, and these days that's a blessing to be counted. Like bunions on an old man's foot.

Anyway, yes: touring. That's me officially at the turning point of things. I have Noodled in Nottingham, lurked in Lincoln, ponced about in Piccadilli, and sung silly songs in Streatham. Got some good crowds as well, certainly the forecasts for doom-and-gloom in Piccadilli turned out to be a load of old badger scrotums, which was a relief. In the end we had a packed room with enthusiastic Polish swearing. Can't ask for more than that, can you?

So right now it's four down and four to go, so I've still got time to screw everything up. In the meantime, I'm spending my days hunched over my tiny wee travelling laptop in trains and hotel rooms, trying to catch up with Book Number The Sixth (which almost had a title, but now doesn't again *sigh*).

And there's a sodding heap to catch up on. Normally I start each book on the 1st of January, hungover or not. But instead of doing that, this year I've been rewriting HALFHEAD, the non-Logan non-series book coming out in September. Which means that instead of handing in the first draft of Book Number The Sixth on the 1st of May like I'm supposed to, I'm only just starting the damn thing now.

Eeeek!

Which is comforting in a 'there's a conga eel hiding in your toilet bowl' kinda way.

So, if I seem a bit distracted and flinchy - now you know why.

In other news of an eventy nature, I'm going to be putting my personal fuzzy parts on the chopping block in June and offering the axe to a selection of forensic specialists as part of the Macaulay Institute's: Murder, Mystery & Microscopes. The idea is that they take a look at some of my books, then tell me exactly where I've got things wrong. All in front of a live studio audience. It seemed like a good idea at the time...

Actually it should be a lot of fun. Certainly the experts involved are pretty damn groovy in the cleverness department:

• Professor Dave Barclay, world renowned forensics expert and Senior Lecturer in Forensic Science at Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen.
• Dr Lorna Dawson, head of Soil Forensic Science at the Macaulay Land Use Research Institute.
• Dr James Grieve, Police Forensic Pathologist and Senior Lecturer in Forensic Medicine at the University of Aberdeen.
• And it's all going to be overseen by Northsound 2's Damien McLeod.

So I'm probably going to be in for a stiff kicking (he said, mixing his metaphors from the earlier image of testicle chopping as it was giving him the creeps).

And best of all, according to the fliers, "As excerpts from the book, descriptions and images of crime scenes may be of a graphic nature, this event is not suitable for children under 16 years of age."

Woo hoo! I has a PG rating.

Apparently the event's already sold out, but the Macaulay are still taking people's details, and if there's enough interest they'll run another one later in the year. If you're interested, you can register at murdermystery@macaulay.ac.uk

In the meantime, I suppose I could either go back to work, or play with the cat. There's half a mouse on the porch that looks as if it might be worth a prod...

You can never go wrong with half a dead mouse. Unless you try to make tempura with it. Then you end up with a little hairy nugget of batter. Which isn't quite as much fun as you'd think.