I’ve been writing a story about a five-year-old, set in Menton, France, drawing on memories of living there and going to school at that age. It’s an interesting exercise, dealing with the youngest narrator I’ve ever created. I drag her about. She digs in her toes, won’t co-operate.

I’ve been getting about a bit this year. I went to the Writer’s Festival in Sydney, am about to go to Wellington as one of the winners of the Six Pack competition, and later to a Book Council event in Christchurch.

In September I go to Ireland for the International Frank O’Connor short story award, for which my book, Opportunity is short listed. My Irish contact, Patrick Cotter (a poet and, I have discovered, the author of a play called Beauty and the Stalker) has sent me an itinerary. On September 18th I will leave Auckland, fly through Sydney and Bangkok, land in London on the 19th, fly to Cork the next day, and appear for a reading that night. The reading and interview are to last at least an hour. Who will stay awake longest – the audience or I?

I will be travelling alone. I don’t like planes, but enjoy the sensation of solo air travel, with its faint atmosphere of crisis and threat. Once I flew alone into London at the very nib end of 1999. The world was anxious about the ‘Millennium Bug’, computers were going to fail, planes were going to fall from the sky. I felt I was flying into the end of the world. My sister and I watched the New Year come in over freezing Primrose Hill. We’d been told to fill the bath with water before midnight, lest water supplies should fail. We forgot. Nothing happened. London was a wasteland on the first day of the new Millennium. Dead winter. I’d never seen it so ugly or so empty. But last time I was in London, in September, it was dreamy, beautiful, benign, all dim green light under thick leaves. I will spend some days there on my way back from Cork.

At the Sydney Festival in June, when asked if New Zealand (the second most peaceful country in the world after Norway) was boring to write about, Lloyd Jones said, ‘But parts of South Auckland are just like Beirut’. I broke in: ‘That’s a bit rich’. What about the body count in Beirut last year, a thousand dead after Israeli bombardment? He dismissed my objection: ‘But you’re from Parnell!’ (Ignorant therefore, of war-torn Otara.)
Perhaps I was being pedantic about a throwaway remark that wasn’t meant to be taken literally. I thought about the various subtleties of the exchange later, when I wrote a Listener review of a novel by Nicholas Shakespeare (in which I considered the problem of writing about a place where nothing very dramatic happens) and also when I read a letter headed ‘Thought for the Day’ in the Herald. The writer of the Thought had been on holiday in France. There, everything was lovely. The people were nice, and kind to their children. Now she had come home to child abuse, swearing, uncouth politicians – all kinds of Kiwi violence. Our country, she felt, was going to the dogs. Others chimed in: NZ was a dreadful, dangerous place… And I thought: it is simply not intellectually good enough to speak in these terms, without reference to context, to the outside world.

On that bleak New Year’s Day in London I walked around the housing estate in EC1 where I once went to school. I remembered the children. They were deprived of space, light, playgrounds, safety, books. Most of all, class status. They were hopelessly poor; they lived in bleak, cramped city apartment blocks, in fouler squalor than anything that exists here. Some were capable of extraordinary violence. Many were very angry all the time. And they weren’t unusual, nor, for that matter, in world terms, the most deprived. (Think of Africa.) If the author of ‘Thought for the Day’ had stepped out of her holiday and spent some time in a housing estate on the outskirts of Paris, or any other big European city, she wouldn’t have been so charmed. She would more likely have been mugged. And come home and written a letter about how lucky we are.