I'm talking about ghost writing at the Bath Festival on Tuesday 2nd March. Come along. I'll be spilling the beans on what it's been like working with celebs such as Robbie Williams and Bruce Parry ...
GOING DUTCH IN BEIJING, my book about global manners, customs and traditions, is still available in good bookshops in paperback, priced £7.99. Profile Books have produced a fine updated edition, which includes extra material on time zones, currencies, international conversions and even the weather you're likely to run into, making it an indispensable part of any traveller's baggage. Please click here to see reviews.
The book was also published recently in the US, and in France, where a very chic-looking pink edition is titled ON SE FAIT LA BISE? The Spanish edition has a wonderfully surreal cover, along with the title HACERSE EL SUECO EN LAS ANTIPODAS (which I obviously don't have to translate for you). Editions are also appearing in Poland, Israel, Brazil and Italy.
Also available:
The Thingummy, co-written with journalist and author Danny Danziger, is a fun look at all those everyday things around us which we can't quite put a name to. That groove of skin between your nose and upper lip, for instance? The philtrum. The little plastic tube at the end of your shoelace? The aglet. The pink pickled ginger on the edge of your sushi plate. Gari ...
But this isn't just a list of odd words - there are too many books like that out there already. Instead, we've used the words as a way into interesting subjects around them. So the terminator, which is the correct word for the line that separates the dark and bright halves of the moon, leads on to a short essay on the fascinating history of moon-mapping. The cradle-switch, that part of the telephone on which the receiver rests, takes us to a short biog of Alexander Graham Bell, an extraordinary figure whose deaf mother was influential in his lifetime interest in communication...
There's lots more where those came from. The name of the raised ridges on your frisbee (plus a fascinating history of that grown-up toy); the name for the space between the top of the wine and the cork in a wine bottle; even the correct name for the crazy sequence of typographical symbols - *%!a*$! - that you might find in a cartoon to indicate a swear word.
You know you need to know these things. And if not you, that word-loving good friend for whom you can never get quite the right present ...
Recently out in the US under the title The Whatchamacallit, we have been featured in Oprah magazine among other places ...
All my other titles available on Amazon, for as little as 0.01p in some cases ...
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