Arrowtown book buyer Miranda Spary continues her regular column about her recommendations for a good read and life as she sees it . . .
Ouch - poor you down there in the cold and dark of a wintry May.
It seems hard to imagine you all snuggled up by the fires at night as I march around Wimbledon Common soaking up the heady smells of lime trees in spring and picking peonies from my sister's garden.
Wimbledon?
Isn't that a long way from Turkey?
Perhaps foolishly I have left my darling to his own dubious devices on Miranda while I have come to London to check my sister's scales and see which of us is lying about our weight loss.
We both are.
We diet like crazy till lunchtime and then slip down that slippery old slope in the afternoon until we are in a state of complete surrender by night time.
Last night was a perfect example.
London's pubs, which were closing in their dozens, are being reinvented and the nearest one to here has been taken over and now serves very posh pub food.
I had planned to have just a little crab and salad, but things went horribly wrong when I discovered home-made pork scratchings and thrice fried chips on the menu.
Now I'm going to have to chop off a few fingers or something drastic before this morning's weigh in.
We've been doing a lot of yoga and yoga here is a lot like yoga at home.
A very social occasion and a lot of chitchat before and after class.
Everyone seems to know about Queenstown and is either desperate to visit themselves, because their children have raved so much about it on their gap years, or have friends who have just been.
One lovely lady I met yesterday said her great New Zealand friends were just here a couple of weeks ago and she is longing to come and visit them.
I asked who they were as New Zealand is such a small place, and I might well know them.
And I did! Her friends are John Key and his wife who had been over for the right royal do ... And on the subject of magnificent dos, I was very sorry to be missing Kathryn Wills' and Gary Lane's seriously magnificent one in Auckland last week.
Sounds as if half of Queenstown flew up all glitzy and glam for it, only to drag themselves home hungover and haggard.
So while you are all partying up or hunkering down, I am trying to spend as much of my time in London doing what I love most - prowling around the bookshops and gorging myself on British newspapers.
Jeremy Clarkson had me in stitches after the hooha over someone on Twitter saying he had been having an affair with Jemima Khan.
He said it had all been a terrible experience - not only because it wasn't true, but that Jemima had sounded so disgusted that anyone might think it had been.
I had to buy the News of the World on Sunday as my nephew had seen an ad saying you got a free Lego toy.
In true NOTW style, their headlines - on what has been a very busy news week here - were FREE LEGO TOY (half the front page) and something about Danni Minogue's hairdo or shoes, or whatever (on the other half).
Needless to say, there were no toys left by the time we turned up with our coupon so there was a bit of sadness in the camp.
To make up for it, I scurried off first thing the next morning to buy The Sun, better known for its full coverage of pretty girls on page 3 than its news coverage on any other pages.
The Sun is promising free Lego toys every day this week, so I am very glad to be going back to Turkey tomorrow.
There's something a trifle seedy and humiliating about buying The Sun.
Seedy and humiliating is not what you expect from Alan Bennett, author of such treasures as The History Boys and An Uncommon Reader.
His latest book is called simply Smut and it features plenty of seediness and humiliation.
Smut is just two stories, both about people keeping up appearances.
The first one is about an older lady whose life changes drastically when her dull marriage becomes a much more interesting widowhood.
To make ends meet, she takes in lodgers and gets herself a job acting the part of a patient for trainee doctors.
Really and truly the title of the book should have been a clue, but I so wasn't prepared for this story.
It's magnificent but you can't help feeling a bit pervy and creepy reading it.
The second one is another gem.
A very handsome, stupid man with a ghastly snobbish mother marries a girl that the mother doesn't think is good enough.
I couldn't help a na na nee na na most of the way through as everyone was getting what they deserved, but in ways I had never thought of.
Alan Bennett really is a magnificent writer and if you need a very short and shocking something to keep you occupied on a cold day, a little bit of Smut will be just the thing.
