At 11 p.m. I sneaked away from my boy’s wedding party to my ground-floor accommodation in the hotel to write for an hour. For two days I had been in sole charge of my boy’s two young sons and sneaking away when possible to snatch half an hour here and there to write last week’s column. But with little or no success. The pair were fanatical for my uninterrupted attention and neither would countenance such a ridiculous waste of our precious playing time.
‘Now look here, chaps,’ I’d said to them on day one. ‘Grandad has had enough of playing games and he is going into his office to do his job, which is to write a column for a highly respectable magazine, and now you must amuse yourselves. If Grandad doesn’t write, he will lose his job. If he loses his job, he’ll have no money. And if he has no money, he won’t be able to buy you any more sweets or Lego.’
They were duly solemn, and I went into my so-called writing room, closed the door behind me, set up the iPad and keyboard, and began typing.
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