Friday, November 3, 2006 at 01:27 PM

Spent last night in Dublin at the Glen Dimplex New Writers Award, for which I had been nominated in the 'fiction' category but did not win. It's interesting, not winning - it felt different to how I expected. I would have thought I'd've been disappointed, at least a bit, but in fact I wasn't really. I had a good, if slightly bizarre, night, the best part of which I spent moaning to my fellow nominees Rodge Glass, James Scudamore and Philip O'Ceallaigh (the winner) about my New Book. I'm currently at the 'it's the *worst book in the world*' stage with it, and seem to have got very vocal, shouting at everyone about how incredibly bad my book is. I went through this with Disobedience too, though, so I think it'll pass.

The evening made me think about the nature of prizes. In general, authors don't have to apply for literary prizes. Someone at the publishers keeps an eye on what we're eligible for and submits our manuscripts, or is asked to submit. We only hear about being part of that process at the point when we're longlisted or shortlisted. So, it's strange. After the award was announced, several people commiserated with me on not having won as if I must be disappointed but the truth is (money aside; money is always nice) that you can't be that disappointed about not getting something you never asked for or decided you wanted.

I suppose it's all about how much you wrote the book (or made whatever creative work it was) with the aim of winning the award. Which, unlike Kanye West apparently, I didn't. I did, however, have hopes of writing not-the-worst-novel-in-the-world as my second book. Sigh. Back to work.

One definition of happiness...

...finding something unexpectedly wonderful on Radio 4 in the afternoon while making a chocolate chestnut cake in preparation for a Jewish festival. Should you wish to recreate this experience, the festival is Sukkot, the cake is Nigella's and the wonderful thing was Coelocanth, an afternoon play. I don't know who Ben Moor is, but I'm now a fan - the play filled me with absolute delight, the use of language is playful and funny, but it moves through comedy into something thoughtful and wise. I don't want to spoil it for you, though. Go and listen.

Not to mention that it's illegal

Sometimes, I hear someone say something so stupid that it causes me to stop for a moment, re-evaluate my axiomatic beliefs and try to work out whether the laws of physics can have suddenly altered. I had an experience like this recently when I was ranting - as I frequently do - about the male/female pay gap in this country (as for example). The person nearest to my ranting grasped his wife's hand and said to me "why does it matter if men and women aren't paid the same? Once you get married, it all evens out."

So, because I had to think this through carefully and because it's always interesting to have to back up beliefs that are so fundamental that you've held them forever, here's why it's important:

• we can presumably leave aside basic fairness and thoughts about what might happen if, horrors, not everyone got married and whether it's OK for single women to be much worse off than single men.
• on average, in Britain, women earn £23,000 a year and men earn £31,000 a year. In London those figures are £29,000 a year, vs £38,000 a year.
• that is, in London, essentially the difference between being able to afford to buy a house/flat and not being able to.
• which means that it's, for example, the difference between an abused woman knowing that she can take her children and set up a new home for her family and knowing that she's financially trapped.
• it is also, in millions of nice middle-class homes across the country the reason that, when perfectly reasonable people sit down to decide "which of us should drop some hours to take care of the children" purely on the sensible basis of finances, it is almost always the women whose hours come down.
• it's therefore the reason that men are deprived of the opportunity to make a choice to spend more time with their children, a thing which many men are rightly getting increasingly angry about.
• and finally, I would submit, that imbalance in child-rearing is at the root of some rather unpleasant consequences in social and psychological terms. If little girls grow up feeling that their daddies are never really there as much as they want them, and little boys grow up seeing that what daddies do is to be distant from the family, is it any wonder that we end up with adult women who are always chasing after the men who don't really want them, and adult men who feel they need to be constantly on the run from family life?

There's more than this but, off the top of my head, that's it for the time being. It's good to rant.

And another thing

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/arts/openbook/openbook.shtml

in which I appear in a discussion about The Short Story. I'd had a terrible day before we taped this, there'd been a huge accident on the North Circular which jammed up most of north west London and meant that 10-minute journeys suddenly took two hours. (Although, to be fair, I'm sure I'd had nowhere near as bad a day as the people involved in the crash, and I hope they're OK.) It was a very irritating day, though, and when I taped this programme I thought I did really badly, coming across as an over-enthusiastic A-level English student next to Andrew O'Hagan's sensible, intelligent thoughts. The editors have done a marvellous job of making me sound as if I had something more to say than "OMG! Short stories! Squeeee!" Which just goes to show why one should always be nice to editors.

Roundup

Some stuff I've done lately.

A podcast: http://www.nextbook.org/audio/podcast_feature401.mp3
Which I have finally persuaded myself to listen to all the way through, while being slightly amazed at how an American twang creeps into my voice when I'm talking to Americans.

Two articles for the Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,1844196,00.html
and
http://www.guardian.co.uk/medicine/story/0,,1851040,00.html

Part of the first was, in my mind at least, a response to an article about Harry Potter academia which enraged me (http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/childrenandteens/story/0,,1838086,00.html). What I object to in this article is not only the lack of engagement with the academic side (and I agree that some of it is tosh, and interesting things could have been said about this) but the female self-loathing which oozes from it. The way the writer refers to herself and other women as "girly swots", as if any academia done by women couldn't possibly be serious. Honestly, we have enough to contend with without calling each other demeaning names. None of these people are "girly swots" - they are brilliant women. Whether or not you find their disciplines convincing is quite another matter. Harrumph.