Diary – 28 April 2007

In thick of whistlestop tour of the US to promote Notting Hell, so the dateline above this diary should read ‘New York, Dallas, Washington D.C, Chicago, Denver, L.A, San Francisco’ which would be a first — for me, anyway. In the taxi to the airport, I compare schedules with the novelist and leggy beauty Santa Montefiore (also touring some cities with me promoting her book The Gypsy Madonna, on our Great British Blondes roadshow. I love it!). I leaf through the bumf and then decide it hasn’t been put together by my fab team at Touchstone Fireside of Simon and Schuster without a map (NY–Dallas–DC??), but by a sadist. There are 5 a.m. starts on no less than five days. I discover that Santa is not only flying business class both ways, but she has cleverly brought an empty suitcase to fill with all the clothes she will buy at Ralph Lauren in New York at $2 to the pound, and has only two early starts compared to my five. She also brought, she mentions, a pair of open-toed espadrilles.

***

On my early morning runs in midtown, I see shoeshine boys, men cleaning windows, bankers jogging, NYPD trucks honking through Central Park, steam swirling out of manholes, mist wreathing the Pierre and the Plaza. It’s all happening. It’s 6.30 a.m. I jog down Fifth towards the Empire State, noting that the stands that used to sell hotdogs and pretzels now sell fruit and baggies of carrots, and that the nail parlours were filled with men receiving the attention of demure Korean maidens. At the Barnes & Noble on Fifth, I halt, panting. A queue. Sleeping bags and picnic chairs. Anoraks with iPods. At 7a.m. Why? ‘Pre-signed copies of the new Tolkien book are available in limited quantity at noon,’ a well-wrapped woman told me (the day I arrived, during a battering nor’easter, the city received more rainfall in one day than on any other since 1882, so Santa’s open-toed espadrilles remain tragically unseen so far by her public).