Mrs Robinson - where will it lead?

Truth is stranger than fiction, as they say. All the ingredients for a novel are contained in the scandal of the First Minister for Northern Ireland, Peter Robinson, or to be more accurate, his wife, Iris. Infidelity, an affair with a much younger man, in the style of The Graduate even to the name of the female protagonist, or the damaged older woman of Zoe Heller’s Notes on a Scandal. Add into the mix, Mrs Robinson’s alleged attempt to embezzle funds for her young lover, and what more do you need? Did Mrs Robinson seduce the young man, or did he take her for a ride, seeing the strength of her emotions? After all, she subsequently tried to commit suicide. Doesn’t it show, though, that no matter how high up you go, how much power you have, and how much is at stake, basic human emotions will over-ride all that?

This is a personal tragedy, but has the potential to be a much greater tragedy. With the possibility of an end to Peter Robinson’s premiership, how will this affect the peace process in Northern Ireland? What will happen to the power sharing arrangement with Sinn Féin's Martin McGuinness? Surely, if the peace process is derailed by this, people will look back at these events for many years to come, with regret at how the antics of a couple of people can change things for a nation.

I am currently reading Notes from an Exhibition by Patrick Gale, and cannot help feeling that this novel is really a collection of events happening to different people – a snapshot of each of the main characters at a specific time in their lives. Although I would hesitate to compare them in terms of literary worth with my own work, in this respect, this and the current serial on Radio Four, Six Suspects written by Vikas Swarup, author of Q and A, which became the tremendously successful film, Slumdog Millionaire are not all that different from my novella A Bottle of Plonk (Have Wine will Travel). Although I’m somewhat laboriously ploughing on with the current novel, it seems to me that a novel of this kind does not require the detailed plotting that I did with Tainted Tree. You create your various incidents, each being an episode or a chapter, and then you link them with a central character. Perhaps this is the way that the post-modern novel is going. Perhaps this will provide me with ideas for a future novel.

Throughout the cold spell, I have been putting out water and bird food, very close to my garden door, and apart from some avaricious pigeons, which I’ve shushed away, I’ve been visited by a blackbird and a robin. The robin has called earlier; it’s now so tame that if I throw out food and say to it, ‘Stay there and I’ll get you a bit of cheese,’ it waits. Then when I throw out the cheese, it dives for it and removes it to the safety of the hedge. I've included today some photos of the robin, both yesterday and a couple of weeks ago, and more icy views from yesterday, when at one point the sun was shining, despite the cold.