Q: Are you’re anxietie’s about, punctuation un-founded?

A: Well, clearly not! I do think sometimes that alerting the literate to poor punctuation standards has not been a kindness, though. Many people who have read Eats, Shoots & Leaves are walking round now in a state of permanent punctuation horror (“Look! Look! Look!”), where they formerly had quite pleasant, untroubled lives. I have been out with film crews and watched with quiet regret as the bored cameramen who started the day saying, “So that apostrophe’s wrong, then?” ended up being quite obsessed. I have seen lives ruined in a single day.

Q: What was your immediate reaction to the news that you were America’s number one bestseller?

A: Hooray. Cor. Blimey.

Q: What were you into when you were 18? Were you a stickler even then?

A: I was quite studious, I think, but I wasn’t a stickler. I think I really only got sticklerish — as I say in the book — when working on that radio series Cutting a Dash. My producer introduced me to the lovely man from the Apostrophe Protection Society, and I suddenly felt I desperately wanted to help out, possibly by starting a militant wing. At 18, though, I was a bit Joni Mitchell-y, if you know what I mean.

Q: When did you last use a semi-colon?

A: I do it all the time; I am beyond hope.

Q: I hear that you won’t get your hands on the revenue from the book sales until the end of the year. What are you planning to do with it then?

A: No idea. Spend it on Slush Puppies.

Q: Is the cat a woman’s best friend?

A: Yes, but the friendship tends to be a bit one-sided. I have an example in Eats, Shoots & Leaves of how the comma changes the sense between “No dogs, please” and “No dogs please”. At events, I like to show this example and explain that, in fact, dogs DO please; they do it all the time; it’s sort-of programmed in. On the other hand, take the sentence, “No cats thank you” — well, the truth of this statement is clear for all to see.

Q: Who do you have to thank for your firm grasp of punctuation? Did you have a particularly good teacher at school? Or are you self-taught?

A: I think I learned most when I started editing, in my early 20s. I worked with a very good editor at the Times Higher Education Supplement — a woman called Philippa Ingram, who was the literary editor. She re-subbed my subbing, sometimes to my utter fury, and in the process taught me a lot. Having said this, I’m not sure my grasp of punctuation is any firmer than many other people’s. I just made a big fuss when I noticed — quite late in the day — that for forty years some people haven’t been provided with any grasp of punctuation at all.

Q: I understand you used to be a sports reporter. What are our prospects in the Olympics, would you say?

A: Blimey, no idea, squire. When I wrote about sport, I mainly did football and golf, and was never assigned to athletics. I often have to explain what this sportswriting was, exactly, because people sometimes say, “Oh, you took a woman’s view of sport, didn’t you?” — which in my mind conjures up a sort-of Fifties lady reporter turning up at Old Trafford in white gloves and tutting about the state of the antimacassars.

My theory is that I was asked to write about football (by The Times in 1996) because I had genuinely reached the age of forty without having the slightest interest in it. Didn’t hate it. Didn’t care about it. Always ran the bath and sang “La la la la” during the Garry Richardson bit at 7.25 on the Today programme. The paper wanted someone with a clean footie slate to write funny stuff in Euro 96 — and I think it would have been hard to find any man with a footie slate as clean as mine.  

Q: What did you achieve by protesting outside a cinema showing the film Two Weeks Notice holding a cardboard apostrophe?

A: Nothing, probably. The only success I have had with such protesting slightly backfired. A charity shop in Brighton (mentioned in the book) agreed to adjust the notices in its windows if I did some publicity for them in the local paper. Their signs tended to say “CAN YOU SPARE ANY CDS”, without a question mark, you see, and this upset me. When I went along to pose for the Argus, the sign now had the same question followed by a question mark, but the question mark was followed by a full stop. So not much of a triumph.

Q: What is the worst grammatical sin of them all?

A: Probably mixing “it’s” with “its”.

Q: I hear that your early novels are about being single in your thirties. Did Candace Bushnell nick your idea?

A: Not at all. In fact, my novels aren’t about being single in your thirties; you have been misinformed. My first novel, With One Lousy Free Packet of Seed, is about a gardening magazine closing down. The second, Tennyson’s Gift, is about a group of real Victorian highbrows in the Isle of Wight in 1864. And the third, Going Loco, is a rather scary comic parable about a woman (in her thirties, but married) who can’t cope with the work-life divide, and so gives up the life completely, letting someone else live it for her.

I did write loads of columns about being single in my thirties, and these are collected in Making the Cat Laugh — but there is not much Sex in the City element, I think. My columns are more about my pitiful attempts at self-entertainment than about sex. I have written only a couple of sex scenes, actually, and they tend to have an allusive quality. The one in With One Lousy Free Packet of Seed takes place while a shed is burning outside the bedroom window. “Is that the Northern Lights?” pants the chap, seeing the red glow on the bedroom ceiling (he’s underneath). “That’s not the Northern Lights,” yells the woman, reaching climax; “That’s Manderley.”

Q: You didn’t start writing until you were into your thirties. What held you back? Do you think you write better because you waited?

A: This is very hard to answer. Some people start writing in their teens, and apparently have nothing to learn. I think it’s useful that I did a lot of editing. In some ways, I’m annoyed that I held myself back for so long. But I do tell creative writing students that it’s a bad idea to start, young, with an autobiographical novel — partly because, having written it, you haven’t really proved you can invent anything; but mainly because I believe you should store this precious, wonderful, uniquely painful stuff until you’re clever enough to use it wisely.

Q: As Eats, Shoots & Leaves shows, punctuation can be a life or death matter— the trial of Roger Casement springs to mind. How far would you go for a comma?

A: I can’t imagine this will ever be tested. I try to picture the scene — “Lay off the comma, lady, or the cat gets it” — and there’s something about it that doesn’t quite work.

Q: Which nation are the best punctuators?

A: Sorry, I don’t know. But not us.

Q: Apart from commas and semi-colons, what sets your heart racing?

A: I’ve just come back from two weeks in Greece, where I’ve spent a few hours every day just gesturing in dumb admiration at the colour of the sea and sighing, sighing, sighing. A racing heart I associate only with stress and pressure at the moment. I’m much more interested in flat-lining, to visions of sparkly turquoise water.

Q: I’ve read that the death of your sister affected you greatly. How did it change you as a writer?

A: It did a lot of things. It made me feel mortal; but at the same time, it made me feel I was condemned to live for ever and watch everyone important to me die and leave me. It was unbearable. In terms of my career, it convinced me that I ought to work less and live more — which is ironic, because I ended up working much, much harder as a freelance than I ever did as a part-time sports writer.

What has probably influenced my writing most in the past four years (my sister died in 2000) is deliberately switching to radio as my main medium. I think the main virtue of Eats, Shoots & Leaves is its solid Reithian quality: educate, inform, entertain. Meanwhile, my radio monologues are my best work by far, I think. There are two or three that always make me cry.

Q: Who holds the record for the most copies of Eats, Shoots & Leaves received last Christmas? I got four.

A: At the risk of name-dropping, Joanna Lumley told me she got seven.

Q: Will there be a film adaptation of Eats, Shoots & Leaves?

A: Of course. I want Julia Roberts for the apostrophe, Kevin Spacey for the dash and Arnold Schwarzenegger for the exclamation mark.

Originally published in The Independent. Used by permission.
Author photo by Barry Lewis.