One of the best things about being a writer is that you get asked to interesting places. I’ve always turned everything down because I believed I should sit at my desk and write. About six months ago, I decided to see what would happen if I accepted everything for a while. Admittedly, I had a kick-start. My BBC film Page Eight, about the moral ructions in MI5 in the past ten years, was given the unusual honour, for a TV film, of closing the Toronto Film Festival. So I went to Toronto (refreshing), then to Edinburgh (uplifting), Warsaw (fascinating), Rome (matchless), Hamburg (serious), Jaipur (fabulous), Eastbourne (serene) and Gothenburg (-14°C). During this period of traipsing down red carpets and giving multilingual Q&As (best audience question in Gothenburg: ‘Where did you buy that coat?’), I’ve written more than usual. It turns out that travel doesn’t distract, it concentrates.
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