Tonight:
5°c
I walk beside the Thames almost every day - through Battersea Park - keeping an eye open for any corpses floating past.
This may seem unduly macabre but some years ago I read in a newspaper that, on average, some 60 dead bodies a year are removed from London's river - more than one a week.
Who are these people? We hear only about the lurid cases - the headless corpses, the voodoo murder victims. But month after month the Thames delivers up its ghoulish cargo.
Most are suicides, it turns out, but there are a lot of accidents. As the tide ebbs, the Thames reveals its beaches and strands, its shingle banks. They tempt people out onto them (mainly drunk people, it has to be said) and they get stuck in the mud - and the tide comes in again.
I pause on the Battersea shore, by the Peace Pagoda, and look out at the placid river. On the Chelsea bank, opposite, the annual flower show is drawing to its close - that ritual benchmark of the beginning of London's summer. A log floats by, heading to the sea, and gives me a nasty second or two.
As always, this juxtaposition of "society" and morbidity makes me think of Charles Dickens.
Our Mutual Friend, the last novel he completed before he died in 1870, begins with a body being hauled out of the Thames by Rotherhithe, and I think he wouldn't be that surprised to discover that the river still carries its grim freight.
The bodies tend to pool at the great U-bend at the Isle of Dogs - handy for the river police, the Marine Support Unit, based at Wapping, the city's oldest police force, as it happens, formed in 1798 to combat theft, looting and corruption in the Port of London.
I happen to know all this stuff about the river as it forms part of the background of my new novel. One of the benign consequences of writing a novel is that you become a temporary expert on matters quite disconnected from your own life and interests.
Over the years I've learned a great deal about surgery, the Duke of Windsor, primatology and Chaos Theory, for example. Now I watch the Targa patrol boats of the Marine Support Unit zooming up and down the river with renewed curiosity. I know what they're looking for.
One of the less benign consequences of writing novels is that you store vast amounts of paper in your house.
Thirty years of manuscripts, typescripts, proofs, notebooks, research material, cuttings and clippings fill cardboard boxes and cram cupboards - a kind of ever growing writer's spoor that is impossible to diminish.
Spring always brings thoughts of a clearing out, of depositing it somewhere in some institution where it can be cared for and catalogued, but there's something slightly minatory about that process, it seems to me, like choosing your plot in a graveyard.
Better to stuff the new manuscripts into another cupboard and wait for next spring to come round.
Kristin, an iguana and a struggle for survival
This weekend, the streets of Chelsea, where I live, will be busy with people with armfuls of flowers and plants, bounty from the flower show winding down for another year.
However, my thoughts are with another festival also drawing to its close but on the Mediterranean, in Cannes.
A film I have written, The Galapagos Affair, is being set up there, I fervently pray, in which, to our incredible good fortune, we have cast Stellan Skarsgård and the luminescent Kristin Scott Thomas.
What makes this more than just another hopeful film project among the thousands of other hopeful film projects in Cannes is that I wrote the first draft of the script almost 25 years ago.
The Galapagos Affair has therefore become, for me, a symbol of the unique travails of the film industry - of the way the art form requires reserves of near-superhuman stamina and persistence (by all parties) in order actually to make a film.
We seem tantalisingly close but I've been here many times before so I try to keep calm.
There seems, aptly for a film with this title, a Darwinian struggle involved to bring this true Thirties story of murder and mayhem in the Galapagos to the screen.
I made the mistake of telling the producer, Michael Kelk, such was my desperate zeal, that if the film ever got made, I would have an iguana tattooed somewhere on my body.
I receive a text from the Croisette: "Know any good tattoo parlours?" I never specified the size of the iguana, I realise with relief. Perhaps I could have a tiny one tattooed under a big toe.
A trip around the world without leaving home
To the National Theatre to see Matt Charman's remarkable new play The Observer, about an election monitor (the superb Anna Chancellor) observing democratic elections in a fictional West African country and charting her traumatic move from impartiality to political engagement.
Political engagement this evening takes the shape of Tamils protesting in Parliament Square and necessitates the taxi driver taking a long detour.
In the lobby of the National a charming elderly couple of Cajun folksingers provide the pre-show entertainment.
Sri Lanka, West Africa and Louisiana come together in a particularly London epiphany, a momentary fusion of disparate cultures. The sun shines outside and the river flows by.
William Boyd's new novel, Ordinary Thunderstorms, will be published in September.
Reader views (1)
I'll be waiting and watching for your new novel
- Joanne Albelo, L.A. USA, 24/05/2009 00:21
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