Dolores Gordon Smith Blog

As I said last week, I invited my old pal, Jane Finnis, to let us know something about her new book, DANGER IN THE WIND set in Isurium, Yorkshire, in the early years of Roman Britain.

Here’s Jane

And here’s the book:

And here’s how Isurium  looks today.          

Image© Copyright Paul Buckingham and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence

Over to you, Jane!

Have you ever wondered what fellow-mystery-writers talk about on the phone? Anything and everything, of course. Dolores and I occasionally discuss our works-in-progress, which  results in some pretty bizarre conversations. Anyone hacking into our phones will have heard us chatting about pagan deities, Roman curses, and last year, while I was writing DANGER IN THE WIND, the subject was Roman forts…or lack of.

“I’ve got a problem, Dolores. I’m looking for a fort for a birthday party, and I can’t find just the right one.”

“A birthday party?”

“Oh yes, they did celebrate birthdays, and Aurelia has been invited to a cousin’s party. The cousin is married to an army officer who’s stationed at a military base. It must be small and unexciting, well away from serious fighting, apparently very safe (ha ha!) And not too far from York, otherwise the whole story will slow down because everyone will need too much time travelling there and back.”

“You can always make one up. The Romans built so many forts, and you must have a good feel for the kind of places they’d choose. Pick a likely spot and let your imagination rip.”

And that’s more or less what I did. About 20 miles north of York are the remains of a Roman town called Isurium, alongside and underneath the village of Aldborough. Today Aldborough is a peaceful, pleasant spot, with the river Ure running close by, and a museum displaying some of its Roman heritage. In 100 AD, I realised, it would be perfect for Aurelia to visit – except for one problem. Nobody so far has found a fort there. Civilian dwellings, yes…but not military.

Yet geography and common sense dictate it must have begun life as a military base. It’s one of a chain of Roman settlements running north from York, first established by the army to guard key points on the main military road to the frontier. Village quickly grew up around them, housing the soldiers’ families and the civilian workers who flocked in to try to part the men from their wages by selling everything from a good warm cloak to a good night out. When the forts were no longer needed they were abandoned, but the villages lived on.

Some haven’t left much trace now, but others, like Isurium, grew larger and grander, and the early buildings were simply pulled down and redeveloped. That’s what must have happened to the fort, and the first civilian houses. The interesting Roman remains there now – mosaics, coins, kitchenware, and more – date  from much later than 100 AD. Isurium in its heyday was a prosperous town with civic buildings, rich houses, and its own defensive walls. It became an administrative capital for the Brigantian tribe who populated most of Yorkshire, so it acquired the name Isurium Brigantum. But in Aurelia’s day it was plain Isurium, and nothing to write home about, unless you got entrapped in a mystery when you thought you were only visiting for a birthday party.

I hope archaeologists will do more digging at Isurium one day to look for evidence of life there before it became powerful and posh. Will what they find  prove that I guessed correctly when I imagined it had a fort? I don’t claim (as Aurelia does sometimes) that “I’m always right, it’s a well-known fact.” But I’d love to be right about this!

The US publishing date for DANGER IN THE WIND was December 2011 for hardback and paperback; in the UK the paperbacks are available from “any good bookshop and, of course, Jane’s website, http://www.janefinnis.com

I’ve just got off the phone from my old pal, Jane Finnis, and I’m very pleased to say that she’s going to do a guest blog here next week about her new Roman mystery, Danger In The Wind.

I really enjoyed Danger In The Wind. The story cracks along, the characters are excellent and Jane’s got an ability to set the scene so you’re really pulled into the story. If you want to get a copy, go onto Jane’s website, http://www.janefinnis.com It’s also available from Amazon and on Kindle, too. For my money. it’s that sense of pace, of really wanting to know what happens next, that makes a book truly readable.

I’m not at all sure that it can be taught, but it probably can be caught, if you see what I mean, from reading enough yourself.  Even the books that you think don’t move very fast are worth thinking about, if only to ask yourself why it’s not working.  This doesn’t mean, by the way, that only all-action thrillers and baffling mysteries have pace.

Pride and Prejudice isn’t a mystery or a thriller, yet it reads like greased lightning.  To Kill A Mockingbird, another old favourite, is another book that, once picked up, is very hard to put down. When Scout sets out on her Halloween walk, we just know something’s going to happen. I think it’s got more to do with having one event follow another event naturally, so that even the surprises (such as Lydia’s elopement with Wickham) don’t seem bolted on, but occur naturally from the events so far and, granted what we’ve got to know about the characters, is a perfectly believable way for them to behave.

I think, by the way, that’s why “real” people and “real” events sometimes seem so utterly out of place in fiction.  Agatha Christie discusses this in the introduction to The Body In The Library. She was inspired by the sight of a well-off, healthy looking middle-aged man in a wheelchair she saw, surrounded by his family in a hotel.  She left the hotel before she could find out what the man and his family where like in real life, as the real people wouldn’t – couldn’t – fit into the story she had bubbling away.  They would have their own characters and concerns and they wouldn’t be at all the ones that Agatha Christie’s creations  needed to make the story work.

Pace doesn’t mean, as Bertie Wooster says somewhere that it should be like life, which is  just  one damn thing after another.  As all comedians and actors know, pace is a sense of timing, so a properly paced book has inbuilt pauses that allow you the chance to stop and savour what’s what.  For instance – I don’t want to give too much away until you’ve read Danger In The Wind – there’s a great “pause” moment when Aurielia wakes up from a dream and realises that the gravely voice of the scary lion she heard in her dream is actually the voice of the murderer…

When an author really pulls it off, then, as Jeremy Clarkson, that lover of all things fast and unexpectedly good literary critic said, the book becomes slightly more important than life itself.  Ok, so perhaps nothing’s that important, but you must have experienced that desire to simply read and keep on reading and to hell with the ironing.  Or washing.  Or feeding the cat.  Or any of the other daily inconveniences that are currently getting between you and finding out what happens to Dumbledore on top of the Astronomy Tower even when you know what happens to Dumbledore on top of the Astronomy Tower.  It’s not that this time it might be different (after all, you’re reading a book, not lost in a coma!) but this time you can see how beautifully it all fits into place.  And, wow, does it work!

One of the nice things about Christmas is getting lots of new books.  What might be even nicer is getting the time to curl up and read them, but that’s another story!  One Crimble pressie from me to me was Jane Finnis’s new one, Danger In The Wind. Jane’s promised me a guest blog, so I won’t say too much more about it at the moment, other than it’s an absolute cracker, with a really good story and well worth adding to your reading list.

One of my other Christmas presents was Clive James’ new book Point of View, taken from the radio series. D’you know the series?  It’s replaced the old Letter From America slot on  Sunday mornings on BBC Radio 4 at quarter to nine.  If quarter to nine is too early, you can get in on iplayer and (usually) as a podcast.  I’ve been a fan of Clive James since the days he wrote hilarious TV criticisms for The Observer years ago.  I mean, part of the fun of watching Dallas was watching Dallas, if you see what I mean, but reading Clive James on watching Dallas was sublime.

You knew you had seen something funny; something that an intellectual French poet would instantly place in the Theatre of the Absurd.  But quite how funny and quite how absurd it was never really hit home until Clive James got to work on it.  What’s more, he had the gift of making you want to go back and watch more.  Whether this is a good thing or not, I’m not entirely sure, but I attribute my ownership of a mug which says, “I shot J.R.” that still lurks at the back of a drawer somewhere entirely to him.

He does a piece about the attacks on private life by the press  (you know, all the phone hacking and so on).  Here’s a quote: “Most of us are capable of grasping that if everyone could suddenly read everyone else’s thoughts then very few people would survive the subsequent massacre…. To live in society at all, we have to keep a reservoir of private thoughts, which, whether wisely or unwisely, we only share with intimates.  This sharing of private thoughts is called private life.”

I had that thought somewhere through one of the first showings of Star Trek, when Mr Spock had Captain Kirk or someone or other gripped in a mind-meld and I wouldn’t be surprised if Clive James had it too.  Basically, any normal person’s  thought would be, “Get your hand off my face,” seasoned with a few expletives and some mordant personal criticism.  However, it did occur to me that one of the place where you can actually move around in someone else’s mind, without incurring an unlooked for degree of violence, is in fiction.

Agatha Christie does this all the time when she’s scene-setting, so we get the same event described by different people with their different takes on it.  It’s a very effective, very quick way of establishing what’s going on and who it’s going on to.  Another neat little trick that involves mind-reading, is when an action is contemplated but not carried out.  I’ve done this a few times, as in, “Jack stopped just short of slamming the door.”  So you get all the emotion of him actually slamming the door without any of the consequences, plus he gets Brownie points for being so restrained.  Then again, having what he’s thinking flesh out what he’s actually saying takes the reader immediately into that privileged space that makes us true insiders.  And it’s fun to write.

There’s certain remarks which you just know are going to be said.  Such as, when it’s pouring with rain, “Lovely weather for ducks,”   and, when the phone rings at eleven at night, “Who’s that at this time?” and – another weather one = “Not bad for the time of year.”  Clichés all, yes, but after all, when the same sort of thing happens it’s unreasonable to ask for a freshly minted, witty  phrase to sum up the situation.  Besides that, there’s a sort of familiarity about clichés which makes people feel at home in the conversation.

The stock phrase for this time of year is, “Doesn’t the house look bare?”  And, yes it does.  The poor old Three Wise Men eventually arrive at the crib, have their (very) brief moment of glory, and then that’s it.  Decorations down, tree gone, tinsel away, the last mince pie eaten.  Because Christmas coincides with New Year, we could, perhaps, spare a thought for the old Roman god, Janus, who’s always looking in two directions, back to the old and forward to the new.  So the house looks different but sort of the same – just like a New Year – and we have a whole new year to think about.

So what’s new?  Well, the house seems not only bare but quiet.  Helen’s gone to Paris for six months, Elspeth’s back in Glasgow, Lucy’s been despatched to Leeds.  The amount of junk telly watched at chez Gordon-Smith has gone down dramatically (although I found myself watching Come Dine With Me so I can’t blame the kids for that)  I can get in the bathroom once more and work, which I’ve cheerfully ignored over Christmas, beckons.

The Three Wise Men, as it says in the gospel, “Go home by a different route.”   Admittedly, it was to avoid the psychopathic mass murderer Herod (the sort of character we all, hopefully, can avoid!) but coming home by a different route sounds a bit like what a new year’s all about.  I hope yours is good one!  Happy new year, everyone.

“It’s cold out there,” said the taxi-driver as I got into the cab.  He was soooo right.  It was also very dark and very wet.  It was, in fact, December in Mirfield, Yorkshire.  I’d been invited to give a talk in the library and all I can say is, bless all those hardy souls who came on an absolutely horrible evening.  “Never mind,” said the taxi-driver.  “It’ll soon be Christmas, innit?”

I’d gaily thought, when planning this little expedition, that I’d drop my stuff off at the library and then find Ye Olde Hostelry to have some dinner.  Well, the first part of the programme worked, but when I called into The Peartree the bloke behind the bar looked at me in a sort of pitying way.  “Food?  In the evening?”  The same tale was repeated in The Railway and in The Navigation. It was as food in Yorkshire is an activity for the daylight hours alone.  Ah well.  The beer in the Navigation was good though.

Literature came to my aid when I finally sloshed my way back to the library.  There was tea!  And shortbread biscuits!  And even a little cake with icing on in a packet.  And, – again, bless them – an audience, including my old pal Anne’s mother, Margaret, who’s read all my books.  Because I’d flung myself on the refreshments, the librarian, Julie, bowed to the inevitable and declared the tea urn and the coffee maker open and the biscuits open for chomping, even though this should have been reserved for half-time.  Flexibility is a great virtue in a librarian.

So, thus fortified, this select group of Mirfieldians settled down to listen to the tale of how you go about dreaming up a book.  Not that even I can talk for an hour and a half non-stop about my books, so I did what I’d done before, and invited everyone there to have a shot at writing too.

The idea is that everyone writes down a well-known phrase (this is part writing exercise and part party game) such as, “A stitch in time save nine,” or “When Santa got stuck up the chimney” (After all, it’ll soon be Christmas, innit?) and swap them with each other.  Then choose a picture from the stack of pictures I had with me, and write the first couple of lines of a poem or a short story, getting in a least a couple of words from the phrase and inspired by the picture.  The results were terrific!  There was one group who did some genuinely creepy dialogue sparked by a moody picture of a Jack The Ripper type figure in the mist, another couple who got exactly the rights words to describe a haunted house and a lot of people having a lot of fun.  Kids in school do this sort of thing all the time, but grown-ups thoroughly enjoy the chance to express themselves, too.

Then Julie wrapped everything up and gave me an entirely unexpected, but very welcome lift to Huddersfield Station.  And there – this was really good – in the Head of Steam, the station bar, a jazz guitar group was meeting and a great many earnest middle-aged men who looked as if they should be talking about sheds, were instead playing guitars like Django Reinheardt.  I curled myself into a corner and listened in complete happiness.  And, as the man said, “It’ll soon be Christmas, innit?”

One of my oldest friends (in every sense of the word as she’s just celebrated her 89^th birthday) is Kath.  We were talking about what kids did in the days before TV.

Well, according to Kath, one of the odder things that kids got up to was to go and look at corpses.

Nowadays, when someone dies, it’s almost de rigueur that the undertaker scoops them up and takes them to a Chapel of Rest, but that wasn’t always the case.

I can remember Grandma laid out in her coffin in the front room (lid off) and the neighbours coming to pay their respects, but although I might very well have seen other people’s deceased relatives, I can’t honestly say I remember it.

Kath, however, led by her pal Aileen, made an absolute hobby of it.

Now, before you think this is too morbid for words, I should explain that although Kath and Aileen were perfectly well fed, this was about 1933 and treats such as sweets and biscuits were rare.  So Kath was a willing listener when Aileen came up with A Plan.

“Have you noticed,” said Aileen, “that when there’s a corpse laid out in the house, everyone who comes to see it gets a biscuit or a piece of cake?  Why don’t we,” continued Aileen, getting down to brass tacks, “go and look at corpses and then we’ll get a biscuit too?”

It was dead easy (if you’ll excuse the expression) to spot the house with a corpse in it because the curtains were drawn at the front of the house.

So those two little girls went round knocking at doors to offer to “say a prayer,” (Kath’s exact words) “over the corpse”, upon which they were ushered into the parlour and, having admired how beatifully laid-out the corpse was, they’d get cracking.

Usually one Hail Mary would do the trick, but sometimes they had to throw in an Our Father as well before the biscuits were produced, while the householder looked on, sometimes moved to tears by this display of infant piety.  There was one occasion, however, where Aileen decided to cut and run when, after a whole decade of the Rosary (!) no biscuits were forthcoming.  “All that praying,” said Aileen in disgust when they were out on the street again, “for nothing!”

It came to an end, however, as all good things do, when the Headmistress of the school, a ferocious nun of the old-fashioned type, wise to any form of rannygazoo, called them into her office.  “I hear,” she said, “that you’ve got a new hobby.”

Kath and Aileen looked at each other for moral support and Kath demurely said, “We’re only saying prayers.”

Even the most clued-up nun couldn’t actually object to that, but she wasn’t fooled.  “In future, I think you should restrict your payers to church.”

So that’s what they did.

I’ve been re-visiting some old friends recently.  Books, I mean, but these are books I’ve known for years, and to pick up an old favourite is very like meeting an old friend.

Take The 39 Steps for instance.  This book suffers, like other very well-known books, from people sure they’ve read the book whereas they’ve actually seen the Hitchcock film.    There’s no problem with the Hitchcock film against which all other film adaptations are measured (Buchan himself enjoyed it very much) but it isn’t the book.

Now, the quest for identity in The 39 Steps can result in hilarity.  Richard Hannay has an uncanny ability in the matter of disguises. Disguise, of course, was de rigueur for any detective or thriller hero of the time, more or less by public demand.  Sherlock Holmes never felt happier than fooling Dr Watson whilst disguised as a tramp, a Lascar seaman, an out-of-work groom or whatever, and where Sherlock trod, fictional heroes for the next thirty or forty years or so more or less either reacted to or from this Canonical pattern, and Hannay faithfully followed suite.

He meets his match, of course, in the sinister chief of the Black Stone gang, who’s even better at disguise than Hannay.  (The chief of the Black Stone, Graf von Schwabing, was such a useful villian, by the way, that Hannay has to defeat him all over again in Mr Standfast and this time, unlike a Fu Manchu, for instance, the elusive Big Black Spider of German Intelligence stayed dead.)

Now, so far, so jolly.  However, the beginning of The 39 Steps does hint at something a little deeper.  Hannay, in that hot summer on the eve of War, has recently arrived from South Africa, a mining engineer of Scottish descent who has made his money.  Like many another Buchan hero, he’s achieved success and, having got it, doesn’t know what to do with himself.  He doesn’t, in fact, know quite who he is.  Fortunately for Hannay, the unfortunate Scudder, to whom he’s given houseroom, ends up pinned to the floor of the flat with a long dagger and Hannay, immediately suspected by the police, disguises himself as a milkman and – for no very clear reason – runs off to Scotland.

Hannay spends the rest of the book in a bewildering series of disguises and – follow me closely – it’s only when he’s pretending to be someone else that he feels he’s recovered the truth of who he really is.

Not only that, but Hannay, being Hannay, and not Sherlock Holmes, feels he has to explain his facility with disguise. He does it by citing his old fried, Peter Pindaar, the Boer hunter, who has told Hannay that if he wants to disguise himself properly – this obviously being a prime need in South Africa – he has to do more than put on another man’s clothes, he has to be the other man; he has to take on his thoughts, his feelings and his identity.  It’s significant, isn’t it?

I’ve talked about The 39 Steps because it’s Buchan’s best-known book.  Immensely readable, it hurtles along and is the book that has ensured the rest of the Buchan thrillers are continuously in print.  However, in the rest of Buchan, the same themes crop up over and over again;  success is greatly prized – and Buchan was a Border Scot with a proper appreciation of success – but it always leaves a “what now?” feeling. Buchan’s books usually start with a feeling of ennui.  Then the hero has to lose himself; a process is that always physically demanding, usually calling for him to live on the edge of whatever society he’s in and almost always involves disguise.

I don’t think it’s too far-fetched to see this as having it’s roots in Buchan’s abiding uncertainty about his world.  A poor boy, he had taken virtually every prize the world had to offer. He was a famous author, yes, but also figured prominently in politics. An enthusiastic hunter, fisherman, walker and mountaineer, he was forced by wretched ill-health to spend long periods as an invalid.  He ended up as the greatly-loved Governor-General of Canada and even achieved, with a blissfully happy marriage, a successful home-life. (So does Hannay; one feels Hannay’s home-life is a reflection of Buchan’s but with fewer megalomaniacs plotting to take over the world.)  Was it enough?  Perhaps not.

It’s very touching that in Sick Heart River, his most introspective book and the one he completed a few days before his own death, Edward Leithen, the dying hero, is seen to be more, far more, than the English gentleman and Decent Chap that his companions thought him. At long last, he finds peace. It reads like an epitaph for his author.

My sister bought me a bread maker, so I’ve been baking my own bread recently.  Now some people, undoubtedly, think this is a bit of a cheat, as what the machine cuts out all the kneading, knocking down, more kneading etc – but I choose what goes in there and the end result tastes fantastic.

You put all the ingredients in, set the machine (which is really a mini oven with a mixing blade) and three hours or so later, out comes a loaf.

I was thinking about the bread maker when I read about an event called NaNoWriMo on the mystery website, DorothyL. NaNoWriMo (I can’t say it without doing a cod Chinese accent) is short for National Novel Writing Month.

That’s the first little hint to be wary.  Is your life so frantic that you haven’t got time for a few extra syllables?  Even when – granted that language is meant to be a means of communication – your listener or reader hasn’t a clue what you’re talking about?  Chill, guys.  You can write shorthand, but do you have to speak it?

So what is National Novel Writing Month?  Well, the idea is to write 50,000 words in a month.   If you’re not used to thinking in word counts, it’s useful to know that’s an awful lot, but the shortest published novels are usually round the 60-65 thousand words, which is 10-15,000 words short.  A usual sort of average for a writer is something around a 1,000 or so words a day.

Some writers, of course, write a great deal faster.  Barbara Cartland could knock out a book in a fortnight or so, Edgar Wallace dictated a entire novel in the course of a weekend (it’s called The Devil Man if you’re curious) and there are a good few others, most famously, perhaps, Robert Louis Stevenson who wrote  The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in three days.  However, these surely are the exceptions.

The point of writing is to be read. And, by and large, the way to write the very best you can, is to plan it.  Then to write it.  And then to go over it, however many times it takes.  And, incidentally, take time to do lots more planning on the way.  If you are bursting with inspiration, as Stevenson was, don’t hang about, certainly, but that story came to him in a dream.  That means his subconscious was bubbling away with it for how long beforehand?

Surely the most likely result of driving yourself nearly mental for a month to produce 50,000 words is to have a sort of literary fast food, when, with more time, you could have a gourmet meal.

To go back to the bread maker, the flour, milk and yeast etcetera go in the pan, together with any added extras that occur to you.  It all, to be honest, looks a real mess and the only result of tucking into the bread-in-waiting at this stage would be a long, thoughtful stint on the loo!  But give it time and heat, those separate elements miraculously transform into a delicious loaf.   So give it some time.  Anything less is half-baked!

I don’t know about you, but I love the TV programme, Q.I.

The main reason for loving it is that it’s presented by Stephen Fry who is dead funny, hugely urbane, unfailingly polite and very (not Quite as the programme title would have it) Interesting, with the amounts of facts, knowledge and quirky little bits of information at his fingertips.  An ideal dinner guest?  You bet.  I’d even bring the wine. And the food.  And my full attention.  And bore everyone stupid about it for the rest of my life.  He’s worth watching whatever he does, but sometimes he’s gets it wrong.

Last night, for example, he threw into the conversation (it was about the weirder ways of collecting tax, of all things) that there was no evidence at all – none whatsoever – for the famous census which took Mary and Joseph to Bethlehem. By the time he’d finished, the whole of idea of the Romans having a census, with everyone trooping back obediently to their place of origin, seemed downright dorky.

Now, it’s perfectly true that we don’t have the census record for Bethlehem in BC/AD whatever, but the Romans certainly did take censuses (or should that be censii?).  They were a bureaucracy, after all and, like all bureaucracies, loved records.  In Roman Egypt census returns were made every fourteen years from about A.D. 20 till the time of Constantine. Many of these census papers have been discovered (they were called apographai, the name used by St. Luke.)  In the Venice Archaeological Museum, there’s the tombstone of a Roman Knight, one Q. Aemilius Secundus, who was decorated for his service in Syria under Augustus and who also conducted a census of 117,000 citizens.  In the British Museum there’s a papyrus from Roman Egypt AD 104 which orders people to return to their homes for a census.

So although we haven’t got the actual census, to say that the idea is inherently silly seems – well, silly.

Incidentally, years ago, when things were a bit more settled in the Middle East, I heard a spokesman for the Bethlehem Tourist Board on the radio asking, in a rather despairing kind of way, that if people wanted to visit Bethlehem, could they do so at another time of year than Christmas.  “You can’t,” he said, “get a bed for love or money in Bethlehem at Christmas.”

Some things never change!

My pal Elaine asked me to come and talk to the Girl Guide troop she runs about being an author.  This was part of a evening devoted to giving the girls ideas about what sort of job they’d like in later life, so we had a doctor, a chief and a teacher (all women) and me.

The doctor, the chief and the teacher didn’t have a problem I had; convincing the kids I wasn’t an Evil Genius.  The problem was my name.

If I had to put my hand on my heart and own up, I have to say I’m not crazy about the name “Dolores”.  Hardly anyone can spell it and precious few can say it from a standing start.  When I was a kid, my friend Anne’s mother used to sing an old Bing Crosby number, How I love the kisses of Dolores, every time I walked through the door.  This was trying.

Moving on to secondary school, we did Latin.  Wow.  What an absolute scream.  I mean, it’s bad enough trying to address a table (mensa, mensam, mensae – who wants to say all that to a table?) followed by the side-splitting moment when we – we being thirty-five thirteen year-olds, all anxious to point out one another’s shortcomings – reached the Third Declension and My Name was declined, so to speak.

Dolor, Doloris, Dolori, Dolorem, Dolore in the singular (and there was only one of me) or Dolores, Dolorum, Doloribus, and – I know it sounds like repetition but it’s the Accusative and Ablative – back to Dolores and Doloribus.

At this point Life teaches us it could be worse.  I mean, I could have been Doloribus… Which sounds as if a kind Municipal Authority runs a transport service just for Me, but would (I feel this instinctively) have caused Hilarity.

The trouble is, however you decline it, the word Dolores means Pain, Grief and Suffering.

And I’d decline all that, no problem.

It’s because of the meaning of the word Dolores that JK Rowling bestowed the name Dolores on Professor Umbridge, Ministry of  Magic employee, sometime Headmistress of Hogwarts, a woman whose idea of detention is to make Harry repeatedly carve on the back of his hand, in his own blood, the words, I must not tell lies. Add to that, being the most boring teacher in the world, undermining Dumbledore, flinging anyone in prison who disagrees with her and setting the Dementors loose in Little Whinging, Surrey, and you get a picture of an all-round bad egg.  I mean, Voldermort is utterly evil, but Dolores Umbridge is just pants.

So, the girl guides reacted with alarm when Elaine brightly said, “Here’s Dolores!”

At least they didn’t sing Big Crosby at me.  And Harry Potter was a good place to start talking about books.

But I still remember the wise words of Bertie Wooster, addressed to Jeeves; “My word, Jeeves, there’s some raw work at the font!”

Exactly.