OK, so we lost, but it’s only a game.

You have my permission to kill anyone who says that. It’s not only a game, it’s the WORLD CUP and we lost, rather unfairly I think. I was in a bar full of French people supporting South Africa. Helllooooo??? Aren’t we all Europeans together? Apparently not. But we were gallant and Jonny was glorious. Percy Montgomerie doesn’t stand a chance. And what was that fall into the camera all about? “That’s Percy,” said a friend of mine who was watching with me. “He sees a camera and he throws himself at it.”

I propose a knighthood for Jonny and a permanent statue in Trafalgar Square. I will be designing a fountain with a vast statue of Jonny in the middle for our garden.

My scoop in today’s Sunday Times didn’t make it to the international edition but you can read it here. You can also read my seminal piece about Jonny in the news pages (since when was the fact that we all love Jonny “news”?). Someone at the paper put some stupid joke about the Aussies and All Blacks in the middle of my text which they got wrong, making me look like one of those awful women who talk about rugby but know nothing. Which of course I am. And they messed about with our scoop, making up some drivel about a lavender garden and cutting out the brilliant neighbour completely. I can see why people hate journalists. But as I have experienced this weekend, it’s often the editors or subs that make stuff up, not us.

Meanwhile I am pleased to report that Olivia is showing signs of becoming a true French woman. She sent her first text to me today. “Olivia + Quentin,” it read. “Darling,” I said. “How sweet, your first ever text. I’ll keep it forever.”

“Don’t keep it forever,” she responded. “I might get another boyfriend.”

Copyright: Helena Frith Powell 2007

Rupert and I have just been to Albi, covering a murder trial. I won’t go into all the details here as am about to collapse after two days hard work but what it taught me is how much fun old-fashioned reporting can be.

I started off thinking the man was guilty, mainly based on newspaper stories I found on the internet. The fact that he looks like a sinister character from a Dickens novel doesn’t help either.

I spoke to the dead wife’s best friend, a charming lady, and was even more convinced of the rotter’s guilt. Then I met more people and heard their side of the story. Then I went to the lake where her body was found, and her house and suddenly it was no longer that easy. Neither Rupert nor I could understand how she could have ended up in that lake unaided.

Finally we met her neighbour. He was terrifying to start with. “What are you doing here?” he demanded. I could tell he was a hunting man by his cars and dogs and was slightly worried we might end up dead too. He huffed and puffed and then said: “If he did kill her he deserves a medal.” Then talked some more and eventually invited us in for coffee. It was one of those classic situations where just doing nothing gets you what you want.

My point is this. Nowadays it’s so easy as a journalist to rely on the internet. We all knock out stories without moving from our desks. But this was the real thing. We were Woodward and Bernstein in full flow. I felt like a proper journalist. One day a film will be made about us starring Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt.

It was all so exciting. Following the trail of the dead woman, talking to the people who loved and knew her. Discovering another side to her that was not revealed in court. And trying to work out how she ended up in that lake.

The article comes out in this week’s Sunday Times. I think we might write a book about the whole affair. An ‘In Cold Blood’ based in France profonde. Then maybe I can come out with Truman Capote’s immortal line: “When I think about how good this book is going to be I can hardly breathe.”

Even if I can’t, we might at least solve the mystery of the Lady in the Lake.

Copyright: Helena Frith Powell 2007

Dear Helena Frith Powell

Wonderful piece in Thursday’s Mail on the pomposity of ladies who object to
an innocent pinch of le derriere.

I’m what you might describe as an older man, but still have hair, most of my own teeth and am told very occasionally that I don’t look my age. I wonder if you think I might be considered one of your followers, so that, at a time and place to be agreed, I might apply a subtle tweak.

Yours sincerely

Neil Coppendale

This charming reader added his phone number to his letter, which of course I won’t be sharing with the rest of you.

Nice letters like this make me as happy as nasty ones make me miserable. But as my friend Jonathan says when I get a really nasty one “mail like this is a sign of success. It shows you can evoke passion in the very stupid”.

Mail like the above is a sign that there are still people in England with a good sense of humour (unlike the lady who had her bottom pinched).

Richard & Judy just called and I may be on tomorrow’s show to talk about bottom pinching. How will they introduce me I wonder? “Bottom pinching expert Helena Frith Powell”? So another upside to my article is that I get to cruise around in a chauffeur-driven car for an afternoon, have my own dressing room and feel like a celeb for three minutes.

If I ever meet the man who carried out the daring deed that caused all this (see today’s article) then remind me to pinch his bottom as a thank you.

Copyright: Helena Frith Powell 2007

We all want a conclusion to this story. It has to be said that it was with a sense of relief that at last something was happening that we watched the news the other night of Robert Murat’s arrest and the house search. It was chillingly familiar to the Soham murders; a local man hanging around the crime scene. And of course he had a dodgy glass eye as well as a shady past so suddenly two plus two made four and here was our man.

It was interesting to see how the Sky news reporter (not their brilliant correspondent Martin Brunt who has been calm and sanguine throughout) went from thinking Robert Murat was quite a “good bloke” to the chief suspect as the course of the news report went on.

He may very well be guilty. Only he really knows. But the fact is whatever else happens; his life as he knows it is over. If they don’t catch the abductor then he will face suspicion and possibly hatred wherever he goes. As he told Martin Brunt yesterday; “my life is ruined”.

This has the appearance of a witch hunt. No one knows anything about this man apart from the fact that he’s slightly dodgy. Slightly dodgy is not a crime and the media is no judge.

The local police are obviously desperate to come up with something. This has dragged on far too long. But to me the only crime so far has been Maddy’s abduction and to a much lesser extent the ineptitude of the police in the hours that followed. I am sure vital clues went missing then. Clues that could probably have determined Robert Murat’s innocence or otherwise, without this trial by TV.

Copyright: Helena Frith Powell 2007

I see that in this week’s Sunday Times I share the dubious honour of being a columnist alongside Vladimir ‘Stalin’ Putin. I realise that good commentators on Russia are hard to find, mainly because he’s had them all murdered, but I am still horrified.

Since Putin came to power in 2000 fourteen journalists have died in questionable circumstances. I found his column dreary bordering on unreadable. I would have preferred to have read something by the brave and brilliant Anna Politkovskaya but she was gunned down in October last year in the lift of her apartment block. Putin was widely assumed to have ordered the killing due to her coverage of the Chechen war. The latest journalist to die was only a few weeks ago; Ivan Safronov, a military affairs correspondent for Kommersant “fell” from a window.

But Putin is not only murdering journalists. What is happening in Chechnya is beyond belief and now it seems he is not above attacking his own people. His police broke up two anti-government protests recently, arresting the key speakers and beating the protestors. Also reported in the Sunday Times this week was the fact that demonstrators were dragged off trains on their way to demos last week. So much for the “democracy” he so long-windedly drones on about in his less-than-riveting column. Instead of writing this drivel himself, which many of us on the Sunday Times are perfectly capable of doing, he should be allowing journalists in Russia the freedom to express their views without fear of extermination.

I wonder what I will be reading this week? Maybe a column on good farming policy by Robert Mugabe? ‘How to be nice to political dissidents’ by China’s Hu Jintao? ‘Look after your Nobel peace prize winners’ by Burma’s Than Schwe? I can hardly wait for next Sunday.

Copyright: Helena Frith Powell 2007

I am planning my trip to the US next week for my book on how not to age. Part of my aim is to interview interesting women of a certain age and discover their anti-ageing secrets. One of these women is the writer Nora Ephron (see below blog things everybody should know).

I have been a fan of Nora’s since I read her novel Heartburn almost twenty years ago. Then of course I saw When Harry met Sally which made me revere her even more and when Sleepless in Seattle came out (one of my all-time top ten films, yes, I know, I’m deeply superficial) she was elevated to goddess status in my mind.

So imagine how gutted I was to hear from her agent that she will be in London when I’m in New York. I briefly thought about re-arranging my whole trip but realised that would be impossible, not least because my ticket is non-flexible and having not yet written anything as good as Sleepless in Seattle I can’t afford another one.

“How about a telephone interview?” I asked. He said he would get back to me. I was thrilled and couldn’t wait to tell Nora that when I met Margaret Jay I hated her on sight, and that was before I even knew she’d run off with Nora’s husband Carl Bernstein.

Today, three weeks later, I finally hear back. It’s a no. “She doesn’t have anything to contribute,” writes the agent. “It all ended up in her book I feel bad about my Neck.”

Well that’s just rubbish. There is really one chapter of the book that is about ageing and you’re not telling me that one of the most prolific female American female writers of our times has “nothing to contribute”. This is a woman who never stops contributing.

Maybe she is just too famous now, but I would hope, well first I hope I become as famous and successful as she is, but then if I do become famous and successful I hope that if a life-long fan of mine who is younger and less successful than I am tries to spend ten minutes on the phone with me I would agree to do it. I mean she could multi-task, paint her nails at the same time and I would pay for the call. She could even get one of her servants to take the call, how the hell would I know? I just don’t see what she has to lose. Maybe she gets inundated with requests every day. Although I can’t think from whom, it’s not as if she’s Sharon Stone (another one who turned me down by the way, but I was less surprised by that).
Iris Murdoch replied to every letter she ever got from a reader. I do too, even the truly offensive ones. It really doesn’t take much, and who are you writing for, if not the people that read you?

So my book will have to do without Nora Ephron. I guess I’ll get over it. And as her mother used to tell her; “Everything is copy.”

By the way, my husband has been complaining that my blog only has pictures of sexy men on it. He says it’s like a middle-aged woman’s fantasy blog. So here is a picture of Sharon just for him. And any middle-aged lesbians who might be reading. As for the rest of you, normal service resumes tomorrow.

Copyright: Helena Frith Powell 2007

I am just finishing off my truffle omelette (like you do) when I get a call from a charming young journalism student. As part of her final year project she is publishing a Swedish newspaper. She has read my articles in the Mail, knows I am half-Swedish and wonders if I could write a 500-word editorial.

“I’d be delighted,” I say. Anything to promote Swedish culture. What there is of it.

“And do you think we could run a picture by-line?” she asks.

There is NOTHING a hackette likes more than a picture by-line, the bigger the better.

“Of course,” I say.

“Could I talk to your PR about getting a picture?” is her next question.

I have always known there is something missing from my life. For a while I wondered whether it was my lack of religious conviction, or maybe the fact that I am sub-consciously yearning for another child or that my La Prairie eye cream has just run out. Now at long last, the mystery is solved. I need a PR. Of course. How did I ever expect my life to be complete without one? What a fool I have been.

Applications on a postcard please.

Copyright: Helena Frith Powell 2007