Every writer’s nightmare

It’s every writer’s nightmare – losing the only existing copy of your current book. Doesn’t happen that often these days, what with the mantra of the modern world being ‘Thou Shalst Back Up’. What’s particularly galling for Francis Wheen is that he had backed up, in the surest way possible, namely printing out a copy of the his latest novel. But even that isn’t enough when you suffer the fate that befell Wheen last Friday: his garden shed, which acted as his office, burned to the ground. It contained not just the printed copy, not just the computer on which the novel had been written – it contained Wheen’s entire collection of 5000 books (including valuable first editions), and every notebook, letter, research document and (to use his own phrase) ‘billet-doux’ he’d collected over a lifetime of ‘inveterate hoarding’. Interviewed about it on Monday’s World at One, Wheen seemed incredibly composed about the disaster; perhaps he was still in shock.