A-ha! Norwich here I come

I am getting up slowly. My aim is to have a leisurely breakfast with the newspaper propped up against the toast rack before catching the 11.30 to Norwich, where I am due to appear at Writers’ Centre Norwich’s Summer Reads.

  

The phone rings. It’s a producer at BBC Radio Oxford, asking if Jo Thoenes can interview me for a programme about genealogy. I readily agree; I appeared on her show when I was at the Oxford Literature Festival in March and I was very impressed with her. I am booked in for a telephone interview in half an hour. I glance at the microwave clock. I realise that I have no time for a leisurely anything; I need to be showered and ready to leave before Jo calls back.

Jo Thoenes

Shaving, I really should have learned by now, is one thing you should not do in a hurry. As well as remove my stubble, I also manage to slice the end of my nose. I have no idea how I have managed to achieve this wound, but it’s certainly very real; my nose is throbbing and blood is trickling into the sink.

When the phone rings, I am sitting on the sofa, leaning forward to avoid staining my shirt, with a piece of toilet paper stuck to the drying blood on the end of my nose. Jo and I have a quick chat and then launch straight into the interview. I’m in mid-flow and suddenly my nose starts bleeding again. I realise I am beginning to lose the thread of what I am saying. I want to explain that for me, the most important of the family historian’s art, is oral testimony, but I am now trying to dab a drop of blood from the carpet, and the word “testimony” has completely escaped me. “Oral…err,” I grab another tissue. “Oral… um… ” I don’t guess what the second word may be in case my Tourette’s tendencies get the better of me.

Jo somehow manages to divert my attention from my nose and back to answering her questions but I can’t think that mine is the most illuminating interview she will conduct today.

A few hours later, my nose has stopped bleeding and I am being interviewed again, this time by Stephen Bumfrey at BBC Radio Norwich. It suddenly strikes me as I sit in this Norwich radio studio and that I am having a very Alan Partridge-esque day. I’m even staying in a Travelodge. All I need now is to have a fight with a trouser press.

After the interview, Sam Ruddock from Writers’ Centre Norwich escorts me round the bookshops in the centre of Norwich, all of which are pleasingly well-stocked with copies of The Mango Orchard, and some even have it in their window displays.

I am delighted to be part of Summer Reads. It’s a reading campaign Writers’ Centre Norwich organises with Norfolk Libraries. I am very proud to be part of the line-up of excellent books: Joseph O’Conner’s Ghost Light, Simon Armitage’s Seeing Stars, Evie Wyld’s After the Fire, A Still Small Voice, Andrey Kurkov’s The Good Angel Of Death, and Katie Kitamura’s The Longshot.

I have half an hour to return to the Travelodge and get changed for my talk at the fabulous Millennium Library. The attendance is good, the audience are generous listeners and ask wise questions (which thankfully didn’t include “What’s that gash at the end of your nose”) and buy a good number of books. Thanks to Sam, Katy and all at Writers’ Centre Norwich for including me in Summer Reads, and for organising it so well. I hope to have another book for you soon.

Taking my time with Robert Elms

I arrive at Broadcasting House to appear on Robert Elms’ BBC London programme twenty minutes early; I didn’t want to turn up late and breathless and pant into the microphone.

I sign in at the security desk, sit and flick through the BBC staff magazine, Ariel. BBC reception areas seem to have been designed to give the impression that no licence fee money what so ever has been wasted on such frippery as comfortable chairs.

A young man with spiky hair and a heavy leather jacket appears at the security gates to take me up to the studio. He is about to speak when a man in a pork pie hat charges through the sliding doors. He is panting, red in the face, and cursing the inefficiencies of the Victoria Line. “I’ve just run all the way from Oxford f*cking Circus,” he says, and kneels in front of the water cooler and drinks several cups. I notice his hand is trembling. I decide against pointing out that the tube station is only about 100 yards away, or the fact that I had managed my own tube journey without a hitch.

Still breathing heavily, the man in the pork pie hat accompanies us to the studio floor. As soon as the lift doors open, he barges out and runs straight into the studio. I sit in the waiting area, and listen on the wall-mounted speakers to his continuing complaints about the short comings of the underground system, this time without the cuss words.

I had been told that I would be on-air just after 11, for about half an hour, but it’s 11.20 before I am called into the studio. I am introduced to Robert Elms and he tells me about his travels in Mexico as I am placed in front of a microphone on the other side of a padded desk from him.

The theme for the programme today is genealogy, and I am here to talk about The Mango Orchard as an example of a genealogical search which culminates in a remarkable discovery. I’ve been interviewed enough now to be able to tell the story about how I travelled in the footsteps of my great grandfather and discovered the Mexican village in which he had left over three hundred descendants, in several different ways. Today, Robert is getting the family history-themed, half hour version.

I am mystified  when, only two minutes into my interview, Robert starts signalling for to me to make my answers shorter and snappier. What is he thinking? We’ve got thirty minutes to fill! The interview is almost over before I realise that, perhaps because of the late arrival of the man in the pork pie hat, I only have ten minutes. Or I had ten minutes. Suddenly it’s over and I am out in the street again.

            I walk to Oxford Circus station and get stuck on the Victoria Line