Dinner last night with a very old (old in years we've known each other, not in any other sense) friend, Roger Law, who co-founded (with Peter Fluck) Spitting Image, a satirical TV series featuring puppets made by the team. The final series was aired over ten years ago but it still remains in people's consciousness - evidenced not least by the length and depth of the Wikipedia entry I linked to above and which is constantly updated and amended. If you have the capacity to view video links I do recommend that you follow the links to the songs. Some of them are offensive (I don't think my South African colleagues will thank me for reminding them of the Apartheid-era South Africa song), all of them are politically incorrect and all brilliantly performed.

Later today I'm seeing another old (this time even younger) friend, Charlotte Mendelson, to discuss her new book due out on 4 May next year, 'When we were bad'. She works for a competitor publisher (boo) as an editor at Headline Review but she still finds time to write the most brilliant fiction. Her first two novels are already in Picador in paperback and there was some debate about whether she was too young to write such important books. Bah phooey I say and if you go this link and scroll down you can hear her (and Joanna Trollope) being interviewed on that subject.