Woke up this morning dreaming of a dog I’d once owned twenty years ago. She looked beautiful and in her prime, and I was very pleased indeed to see her again. Which I can’t say for a blog I wrote last week recounting the theft of my wife’s handbag in Amsterdam, together with its miraculous return [we found it in a rubbish bin in the local park, four hours later, on our way to the British Consulate to get a temporary passport – everything intact bar the money and the mobile phone]. The blog took me two hours to write, and then it disappeared into the ether somewhere, never to be found again. Serves me right for not preparing it first on Word [which I’m doing with this one – forewarned is forearmed]. I now realise that I have just told the whole story in about thirty words and five minutes, so there must be a lesson in there somewhere.
We’re now on 28 foreign rights sales for The Nostradamus Prophecies, with Denmark, Indonesia, and Catalonia coming on board. I’m particularly pleased about Catalonia, because I have many friends in Mallorca, and at least this way I’ll be able to find out if the translation is up to scratch. Atlantic are also arranging for me to do an author video for the British launch, which should be fun. Look out, too, for a poster campaign in a bunch of London and South-Eastern railway stations in the last two weeks in July – I’m secretly hoping I can snaffle one for my literary archive [although not from the stations, of course – talk about shooting yourself in the foot].
All in all I’m rather looking forward to July and August, therefore, especially if this wonderful weather continues. Why is it that the British complain when it’s too cold, and then complain when it warms up to 30˚, which is about the temperature of an average day in the Lot in May/June? It’s been touching 46˚ in India recently. Now that’s hot. The sort of heat in which you have to walk along with your hand in front of your face to stop your eyeballs frying.
PS: Here is the recovered - originally thought lost - blog, which was to be entitled, A Bag in the Hand is worth Two in the Bush.
It’s a good story, so I’m appending it here for anyone prepared to suspend disbelief for a few minutes…
‘A busy week, which has taken us up to 27 foreign rights sales for The Nostradamus Prophecies, with Turkey, Denmark, and even Indonesia [something of a first, I gather], coming on board. You win some, you lose some, however, and I have a true story to tell you - a story which may well serve as a reminder about the big bad world out there just waiting to gobble up unsuspecting authors and their wives [as well as anybody else who sticks their heads over the parapet]. And also of the surprisingly nice world out there, and the many decent and sympathetic people in it.
My wife and I had been visiting Holland, and at the start of this week we were in Amsterdam. We always stay in a splendid little hotel called The Owl, situated down a one way street just behind The Marriott. On Tuesday morning my wife was having a late breakfast - I had already finished and was sitting in the hotel garden talking to a friend. Suddenly my wife appeared and said “I think I’ve lost my handbag.” We did all the usual things - asking people if they’d taken it by mistake, looking under tables, checking our room. But it soon became apparent that the bag had been stolen, together with my wife’s passport, credit cards, mobile phone, etc. etc. Peter, at the desk, then had the bright idea of checking the video footage of the lobby. True to form, we soon identified a non-guest hurrying past the front desk with my wife’s bag clutched under one arm. Peter then checked back and found further video evidence of the same man entering the hotel forty-five minutes earlier and posing as a guest in the breakfast room - the miscreant had obviously been waiting for someone to leave their bag at the table for a few seconds while getting themselves a fourth cup of coffee from the buffet, and my wife - a renowned coffee addict, in the very best, and non-Dutch, sense of the word, needless to say - was the first to oblige.
Cue telephone calls to credit card shredders back in England, cue visits from the local police, cue visits to the local police station, cue fifty minute interviews with extremely sympathetic local policemen and policewomen, cue cups of tea from the Dutch police network’s private stock, cue calls to the very helpful British Consulate, cue visits to the photographer to get new passport photos for my wife. All this took maybe four hours. Clutching the photographs [my wife was looking pretty glum in them, as her ranch in Mexico had been burgled just the week before], we decided to walk through the park to get her replacement passport at the Consulate. On our way, knowing that the thief had fled in that direction, we went through the motions of looking in all the bushes, flower beds and litter bins in the vain hope that our robber may have dumped the bag in transit after rifling it for cash.
About three quarters of a mile from the hotel we decided to give up looking - it was more than four hours since the robbery, and we figured that the bagmen and bagladies of Amsterdam would have done their rounds by now and hoovered the thing up. “Let’s check in one last bin,” I said to my wife. We trudged across to a monstrous green bin situated near a Hot Dog stand. We looked in, feeling rather drained. “That’s my bag!!” shouted my wife. And there it was, Readers. Intact. Top of the heap. Passport and credit cards and little pink purse and lipsticks and compacts and sunglasses and reading glasses and whatever else women keep in their handbags all in situ. And not even a ketchup stain on it. We high-fived the half dozen or so kids sitting on a bench nearby, and scuttled back to our hotel to recount the good news to all our friends. Returning to our room, we found that the Owl Team [the hotel management and staff] had presented my wife with a lovely bouquet of flowers to cheer her up. Peter, the owner, said he hadn’t heard the like in all his years at the hotel. He was even more stunned when we told him that an Amsterdam taxi driver had given us a lift from the police station to our hotel FOR FREE. “This is impossible,” he cried. “The bag I can believe. The passport I can believe. The credit cards I can believe. The video evidence I can believe. But an Amsterdam taxi driver not charging for a fare? No. That? Never.”