‘Why are you here?’ asked Dr Salt, a question I’ve always viewed as the quintessential good joke.

‘I don’t know’ – I gave the honest reply.

‘What’s wrong with you?’ He appraised me, he was impatient, slightly built, about seventy, his shirt short-sleeved  clean - I could see the weave of its rough cotton - his eyes grey, hypnotic, reflecting something unreadable to me. He sat disconcertingly close.

‘I’m not sure’ I said.

‘What illnesses have you had?’

‘Nothing much. A bit of cancer ten years ago, my liver’s not right … I’ve got high cholesterol, my back hurts..’

‘You weigh fifty kilos’ he snapped - Not bad, I weigh about forty eight.

‘What’s your blood group?’

‘I don’t know’ I said. I feared I seemed uncooperative.

‘If you’re blood group A you don’t need meat.’

‘I don’t eat meat,’ I said unhelpfully because if I wasn’t blood group A maybe I needed the meat I didn’t eat …

‘I’m blood group A’ he said.

He took my blood pressure. ‘Normal’ he snapped. Then the session began:

Your lips are dry, he said. And your skin. Why are your lips dry? Because you don’t drink enough water. That’s why your liver’s not working properly. That’s why your cholesterol is high. That’s why you have arthritis. Why don’t you drink enough water? Because you are not thirsty. Why are you not thirsty? Because you don’t eat enough salt.

He got a little tub of salt from his desk, dipped his finger in and licked it. I did likewise.

You must drink three litres of salt water a day. Half a litre when you get up in the morning. Most people die in the morning. Half a litre before you eat. Half a litre before you sleep. Keep a pot of salt on your desk. Listen to your body. Animals know. Stay here a week and you’ll have the intelligence of a goat. Cars run on petrol, washing machines run on washing powder, the human body runs on salt and water. If you have an accident what is the first thing they do in hospital? Put you on a saline drip.

He got up and breathed on the window. It made a steamy patch. Every time you exhale you lose water. You must replace it. You sweat. You lose salt and water. Lick your skin. I licked. It tasted of Jo Malone’s jasmine and mint. It’s salty he said. You are losing salt.

But we are told salt is bad for our hearts, I ventured.

You are told wrong, he snapped. If you are told something a thousand times you believe it. Hitler told lies to the Germans, Milosevic told lies to the Serbs, and the Jews in New York tell lies about salt. Tears welled in his eyes.

I began to feel nervous. My two friends were waiting outside the room. Would they get me out of here? I looked around. There were images of the Virgin Mary and Christ crucified.

Animals know, he said. Listen to your body. Think of the tsunami. Three days before it and the birds and animals left. They knew. The schools were full. Don’t believe what they tell you in school. The children in the school died, the goats lived. Stay here a week and you will be like a goat.

I was with him for 45 minutes. My friends looked alarmed when I emerged. Why didn’t you rescue me? I asked. We didn’t know how, they said.

Dr Salt – I never learned his real name - was a doctor at the medical centre of the Terme Dobrna in Slovenia, a health spa. My friends and I had booked in there for a week to get fit and beautiful. God it was good. We spent our time running from one indulgence to another. We swam in the spa water and walked in the mountains. In the evenings there was ballroom dancing and bingo with a prize of over-sized flip flops. To avoid getting over-excited I went to bed at 8.30. Dr Salt prescribed a regime for me of fangos – hot mud wraps - thermal baths, salt peels and massages. Don’t bother with the gym he said. Walk in the forest. Listen to your body. Be like the goats.

For the Slovenians  spa treatments are part of their health service. It struck me our medicine is good on testing – endless testing - and radical treatments, but rotten or non-existent on feel-good palliatives.

I loved my fangos. Each morning Marija slapped a huge dollop of red hot mud on a polythene sheet. I yelped as I lay on it, she wrapped the sheet tight round me, covered me in blankets, turned out the light and left me for half an hour to drift into a warm calm peaceful pain-free place. And the massages were something else. Never have I felt so aligned detoxified hydrated and goatish. Though when I emerged from my Abayanga my friends said I looked like I’d been gang-banged. For an hour and a half wearing only a paper thong I was pummelled to near death by a twenty-something-year-old Slovenian. He said he was opening my shackras. He put a towel over my face, poured hot oil over my hair and kept thwacking the soles of my feet and whacking me and telling me to relax. Did I feel good when it was over. Slept like a log. We’ve nothing like it on the NHS.

Last week as part of the London Literature Festival there was a sort of Gay Good Read event at the Queen Elizabeth Hall. Eight of us – authors - each talked about a book. Sarah Mcleod – who has written a quirky, delightful debut novel In Search of the Missing Eyelash – chose Crocodile Soup by Julia Darling. Before her talk she went to the front of the stage with a pineapple, took an orange and a hammer from a carrier bag and as she whacked at the orange asked the audience ‘What book’s that?’ Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit someone yelled and the pineapple was theirs.

This cameo was staged, I think, to reflect the scorn of the Lavender Library organisers at the way Jeanette Winterson declined their invitation to take part. Paul Burston wrote in Time Out on 26 June that in her refusal she told them she thought gay literary events ‘divisive and unnecessary’. Apparently she was ruder than that. ‘I hope lesbian readers will remember that comment the next time she has a book out’ Burston wrote.

I’d have taken scant notice of such shenanigans had I not suffered Winterson at the Shakespeare & Company festival ‘Real Lives, Biography and Memoir’ in Paris earlier in the month. Overall it was a brilliant festival superbly organised and with an impressive line-up. My event was billed as ‘1928: The Well of Loneliness, Orlando and The Ladies Almanack: Jeanette Winterson and Diana Souhami in conversation’. I was pleased to be invited and confident I had a contribution to make. God knows I’ve written enough about Radclyffe Hall, the love affairs coded into Orlando, the freedom of Paris for literary lesbians like Djuna Barnes.

Way before the event I suggested to Winterson that we meet ‘to talk about what we were going to talk about’. She didn’t respond. Half an hour before it I went to her Paris flat. She’d been shopping. I outlined the themes I hoped we’d touch on….

You clearly know a lot about it, she said.

We’re billed as in conversation, I put to her.

Nobody would want to hear us talking to each other, she said. That would be really boring.

What then? I asked.

It’ll be fine.

There was a table, two chairs, two microphones. Winterson adjusted both microphones toward herself. I sat to one side. ‘I like to stand up for these things’ she said but then sat down perhaps because I was there. Someone gave me a hand-held mike. Winterson launched into a winsome sermon: The Well of Loneliness was the worst book ever written, Radclyffe Hall was ghastly, without imagination or style. She picked up my copy of The Well and in a mocking voice read out a passage I’d marked. I felt like Edna Everage’s Madge. This too will pass, I thought. I managed a brief interjection: yes, it was a naive book, embarrassing, but the point was that it was ‘consigned to the King’s furnace’ because the Crown Prosecution ruled the subject matter of lesbianism inadmissible in fiction.

That was enough from me. Orlando, Winterson declaimed to her audience, now that was a splendid work of art… Biography was a waste, it didn’t matter who did what and when, what mattered was art, the creative imagination - her own perhaps and Virginia Woolf’s. I tried to interject… Coded into Orlando… Violet Trefusis… I gave up and stopped listening.

On 27 June The Times published Winterson’s harangue. In print it seemed worse than when she blew me out with it in Paris. It appeared under the heading ‘Jeanette Winterson pitches Virginia Woolf’s Orlando against The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall.’

There was a mistake in every line. Here are a few:

Orlando, she says, begins ‘He, for there could be no doubt about his sex.’

But Orlando begins ‘He – for there could be no doubt of his sex, though…’. How could Woolf write ‘doubt about’… Even in the holograph first draft she tried ‘doubt as to’ then corrected it, such was her alertness to style. And she was too intelligent and ironic to be as categorical as Winterson makes her seem with that full point.

‘The Well of Loneliness, Winterson writes, purported to be telling the truth about the “third sex”. For this reason it was banned in in Britain until 1960…. there is no sex in it at all.’

But The Well was banned as obscene in 1928 and burned because the government of the day deemed the subject of lesbianism ‘inadmissible in fiction’. The book was, said the Attorney General Sir Thomas Inskip “propaganda for the practice which has long been known as Lesbianism, a well-known vice, unnatural, destructive….’ The ban on it was lifted in 1949, not 1960.

‘When’ Winterson writes ‘The Well was published, the Daily Express reviewer wrote “I would rather give a healthy boy or healthy girl a phial of prussic acid than this novel.”’

But this was not from a review in the Daily Express. It was from the leading article – five columns of diatribe - in the Sunday Express by the paper’s editor James Douglas under the headline A BOOK THAT MUST BE SUPPRESSED.

The Well, she writes, though banned in Britain ‘was published in France and copies were shipped across the Channel to eager readers’.

But it was not published in France. And copies printed from plates smuggled over to Paris were seized by the police when they reached England.

‘What a relief’ she writes, ‘to find Woolf’s Orlando published six months later.’

But The Well was published on 27 July 1928 and Orlando on 11 October – three months later.

So it goes on – I can’t be bothered to list half of it. But never mind if she’s weak on accuracy and thoughtfulness, she sure does make up for it in opinion and self-promotion.

For more reasons than its title, The Well of Loneliness is an embarrassment: its tendentious prose and repeated exhortations to God, its theory of lesbians as a third sex and failed men … why, reading it’s enough to turn a queer girl straight.

Dull it is, lewd it isn’t. But eighty years ago it was judged an obscene libel by England’s law lords who had it burned in the King’s Furnace. It was destroyed solely because of its theme, for ‘and that night they were not divided’ is as hot as its description of lesbian lovemaking gets. Its theme inflamed the Home Secretary Sir William Joynson-Hicks, the Director of Public Prosecutions Sir Archibald Bodkin, his deputy Sir George Stephenson, the Chief Magistrate Sir Chartres Biron, the Attorney General Sir Thomas Inskip, the Chairman of the Appeal Court Sir Robert Wallace and other peers of the realm, guardians of the nation’s morals and members of the Garrick Club who believed this book would corrupt the morals of the young.

‘It is a plea not only for the toleration but for the recognition of sexual perversion amongst women,’ lamented Sir George.

‘It is inherently obscene and gravely detrimental to the public interest,’ averred Sir William.

‘These unnatural offences between women which are the subject of this book involve acts which between men would be a criminal offence, and involve acts of the most horrible, unnatural and disgusting obscenity,’ explained Sir Chartres.

‘It is more subtle, demoralising, corrosive and corruptive than anything ever written,’ wailed Sir Robert.

‘I would rather give a healthy boy or a healthy girl a phial of prussic acid than this novel. Poison kills the body but moral poison kills the soul,’ raged James Douglas editor of the Express.

So horrified were the oligarchs by a book about lesbians, they manipulated the procedures of the law to achieve the silence they desired. They disallowed trial by jury or any expert evidence which might have helped the case for the defence.

I wrote my biography of Radclyffe Hall nine years ago. I called it The Trials of Radclyffe Hall, for her whole life was a trial, though it was outrage at the banning of her book and scorn for the process of law by which it was banned which prompted me to write about her.

Over the past weeks I have been, and in the weeks to come I shall be, writing ‘anniversary’ articles and giving ‘anniversary’ talks defending publication of the woeful Well.

Eighty years is not that long ago. As late as 1946 the 1928 ban was upheld by the postwar Labour administration: ‘From the Home Office point of view it would be most undesirable to have the question reopened…’ a spokesman for James Chuter Ede the Home Secretary said.

The use of the law to enforce silence is more than depressing. It is crippling for a dedicated writer to have her work destroyed. Historically, lesbian writers have taken flak from family too. ‘You can’t touch filth without getting filthy’ Radclyffe Hall’s mother said to her when trouble erupted over The Well.

Four years earlier, when Vita Sackville-West and Violet Keppel, under the guise of fiction and changed gender, wrote an account of their intense love affair, both their mothers insisted proofs be destroyed and publication defeated. They paid the publisher off. The book had variously been called Rebellion, Endeavour, Challenge, but Conformity won the day. ‘I hope Mama is pleased,’ Vita wrote in her diary. ‘She has beaten me.’ ‘It is nobody’s business to know our private lives,’ Lady Sackville wrote in her own Book of Reminiscences. ‘The less said about it the better. Silence is wiser. Toute vérité n’est pas bonne à dire.’

And when the Washington Post published a review, under the heading ‘Sappho sings in Washington’, of Natalie Barney’s Sonnets de Femmes - poems in French about her lovers - her father sailed to Paris, bought up and destroyed the printer’s plates and all available copies of the book and took his daughter home to Cincinatti.

So it goes on: the nervous connection between sexual freedoms and the law, between candid expression and causing offence, between writers who by definition try to push against walls of silence and their detractors who view silence as wise.

I never talked of my lesbianism or hopes as a writer with my parents ‘toute vérité n’est pas bonne à dire’. My mother though, without reference to their content, kept my books stacked on show on her coffee table and viewed one in particular of my partners as her friend. And my father after publication of my first book – a biography of the society painter Gluck – and a consequent piece about me in the Observer, phoned to say ‘it’ (you know what) made no difference to his love for me.

More recently, fictionalised references to the narrator’s mother in my latest book Coconut Chaos incurred high-handed disapproval from my three brothers. They emailed a Severe Warning:

…Your semi-factual use of private family matters means that Mark, Stephen and I will need to watch out for what you write about the family in any future book. We may need to challenge remarks that we consider defamatory. Fortunately the lawyers seem very aware of the consequences of defamation and of breaches of the Data Protection Act.

Yours

Robert

That was December 2006. It marked the end of our never-very-encouraging stabs at communication. I didn’t reply. It was a disconcerting email to receive on the eve of publication. How odd, I thought, to use the word ‘fortunately’ in the context of threatened legal challenge to publication of a book by me. But at least in this particular corner of the world, eighty years on from the woeful Well, lesbians and lesbian writers and writers about lesbians and writers who push at the walls of silence, are better placed to withstand onslaught from family and the law than in 1928.

I’m doing an annual cull. Chucking possessions. Culling comes easily to me - too easily perhaps. My adage is: If in doubt, Out. Letters, photos, manuscripts, clothes, things, people – I shred, recycle or bag them up and take them down the charity shops for someone else’s use. There’s an oppression about possession and I like to travel light. Natalie Barney said the trouble with possessions, is that they possess you. A psychiatrist once told me they were my rivals, which is the sort of thing psychiatrists tell you.

Books are a bit of a problem but this time they’re out too. My flat’s being painted Stark White and I want it to stay as empty-looking as my diary and my mind, so all those paperbacks with brittle spines and yellow leaves and scruffy covers – out, out.

It hurts a bit when out go the true friends of my youth: Carson McCullers, Jean Rhys, Anais Nin, Graham Greene, John Steinbeck, Scott Fitzgerald, Doris Lessing, Vladimir Nabokov…. but they look so worn, old and neglected, and I won’t read them again, and I only hazily recollect their content, and though I’ll not read future books with quite such caring as I felt then, Out. Out they go.

I think old people cull more as their time runs out. Bit by bit we relinquish.

Last week I heard Joan Didion talking about her Year of Magical Thinking. She wrote it after her husband and daughter died within eighteen months of each other. She seemed fragile, emaciated, wraith-like, unconsoled, tough. She said she couldn’t chuck away her husband’s shoes because if she did she knew he wouldn’t come back. And I thought how, with all my ease of culling, I haven’t deleted my mother’s phone numbers – not for her house, long emptied and sold, or for the hated old people’s home where she died alone a year and nine months ago. Because if I do cull those, then I know I won’t be able to phone her up.

This morning in Mrs Blackbird’s nest I spied at least two blue eggs. I peered furtively when she’d hopped off to pick up a sultana or two. She spent all last week building it in a tub of ivy. It’s a metre away from my balcony glass doors so if I turn the tele round she can watch it in bed. I marvelled at her industry. I helped as much as I could by unravelling and cutting up bits of waxed garden twine. First she constructed a mud foundation, on top of this she did basket weaving with twigs and twine, then she carpeted the whole thing in what looks like astroturf. She’s used the back of the tub as an rsj and wedged the whole dwelling into a branch against the wall to keep it secure and out of the wind. Mr Blackbird didn’t lift a beak. Wouldn’t you know it. But today when I went out to try and sweep up he made a noise like a scud missile and dive bombed my ankles. Which is a cheek seeing as how it’s my balcony and my pot and my ivy and my sultanas… It clearly says in my lease that the outside area contiguous to my flat belongs to me. I signed no agreement permitting squatters to set up home and raise a family right in front of my living-room windows.

I can see her sitting out there, in there, now and there’s a hailstorm. I kind of wonder if she’d like me to put a brolly up for her but I have a feeling she’d rather I ignored her completely and just relinquished all territorial rights. I guess I’d better leave her be. You can’t teach a blackbird how to hatch eggs.

For two days last week I couldn’t access the internet or email. I made pleading calls to technical advisors at Madasafish dot god knows wot dot com. Each time I phoned I was attacked for an eternity by music that made me feel I’d died and gone to a wicked place. On instruction from Ravi and Rupesh I then typed strings of numbers into my browser address bar, typed la di da on the login page, clicked on setup then isp settings, typed and retyped some garbled user name and garbled password, clicked on apply and tools and system command and save all and status and connection status, ran the easy setuputility, and system log. No connection. No connection. Salman told me there must be something wrong with my SWAMG-52196 and I should buy a new router.

And time passed and the day went and life slipped by. I thought of how when I was a child my mother, while I skulked with embarrassment, would demand – demand with passion - to see the manager – in millinery, glassware and soft furnishings - of Mr Debenham and Mr Freebody and Mr Marshall and Mr Snelgrove. I am my mother’s daughter. I phoned up Madasafish and demanded – with operatic passion – to speak to the manager of technical services. I told Sanjeev how my life was in tatters, how I’d done no work all day, how I had extremely important email, files, manuscripts, documents, tracts and photos that must be sent that very day if the world was to stay on its axis and my sanity maintained….

He was very nice. He had a soothing voice. He spent an unconscionable time instructing me on what to type into my browser bar and how to reconfigure my encryption key and reset my isp username malarkey. No connection. Then he said he’d make some enquiries and phone me back.

Some hours later he told me there was a fault at the exchange. BT was working on it. It should be fixed by 5 pm. I’d be compensated.

That evening in our local Italian eatery there were quite a few people who’d had miserable days with their computers. Apparently it was a serious fault and offices were down in Moorgate……

Next day I still couldn’t log in or on or up. I phoned Sanjeev who told me the fault had been fixed, but all my configurations were now skewed. He talked me through it again, isp username, ppp settings, lan configuration bollocks. Connection. I thanked him profusely. A bit later I phoned back to say I’d lost my trusted wifi connection and did he know why and how I could get it back.

He said he wasn’t going to confuse me and I’d have to leave it. After about a week I worked it out for myself that somehow it was still there but had got renamed.

There are so many times when I’d like to go back to a pencil and a lined page and throw my MacBook out the window. But there are so many times too when I fantasise about a country house and a real garden and true love. The reality is I’m hopelessly bound up with this urban fiend of a machine. We are entirely unsuited to each other. We have nothing in common. I know it’s giving me a brain tumour. But it/she has a hold over me, I depend, am afraid and reliant on its/her (his?) superior stupid cunning intelligence. Can’t manage without it. Panic if it withdraws its cooperation or interaction. Don’t understand it. Don’t want to. Am lumbered with it. Need it.

‘Women who’ve had facelifts – they all look like sisters.’

‘You must never leave mummy and daddy.’

‘I woke up in the night and I didn’t know who I was.’

‘I don’t want to eat anything with a face.’

‘I’d like a hug and a squeeze but I don’t want what goes with it.’

‘You can’t learn anything you don’t already know.’

‘Try to say something nice.’

There’s a depressingly interesting piece by John Lanchester in the latest London Review of Books - an appreciative review of Nick Davies’s book Flat Earth News about the parlous state of British journalism. It explains why people like me, who used read newspapers each day for information, now scarcely bother with them. The salient points are these:

Contemporary journalism is corrupted by an endemic failure to verify facts and stories.

Papers have switched from reporting facts to opinions from columnists.

Only twelve per cent of what’s in them is material the reporter has found out and checked on her or his own initiative.

Eighty-eight per cent is ‘churnalism’ - rewritten wire copy, mainly from the Press Association, and Public Relations organisations.

Press Association staffers write an average of ten stories in a single shift. ‘If the government says Saddam has WDM that’s what the PA will report.’

Modern journalism is now ‘the rapid repackaging of largely unchecked second-hand material, much of it designed to service the political or commercial interests of those who provide it’.

Stories aim to be cheap, libel free, safe, and to give readers what they are supposed to want ‘lots of celebrity and tv-based coverage’.

Papers ‘have succumbed to their own internal celebrity culture of columnists, most of whom make no attempts to report on the world in favour of sermonising about it’.

Usually such columns are hung on news-related pegs so if the news is a load of churnalism…

Papers get larger and larger with no expansion of resources to do the work of filling them.

I found myself wondering about the effect on us of constant bombardment with misinformation. It seems we now live in a miasma of unreality – we should not believe politicians, we should not believe journalists, we should not believe what we’re told is so. And over and above doubtful veracity there’s so often an offensive tone from journalists, a sort of scornful superiority. In good fiction things might not be literally true, but the way they are told is literarily true. Which enlightens. But misinformation in a hectoring voice…

I suppose disaffection encourages solipsistic retreat: the turning to computer screens, to blogs, youtube and the karaoke mess on the ever growing world-wide-web.

I link up to this anarchy, to this interactive con. I quite like random blogging into the blue. But I have assiduously kept to a rule with my blog: print nothing out. My blog has no corporeal shape. It exists only in cyberspace. It is not for publication. Pull the plug and it’s gone. Which is no bad thing. And at least it leaves the trees in peace.

My book group meets every six weeks. We decide by raffle what fiction to read. We each suggest two titles: one classic, one contemporary. The time before last my choice of the new translation of War and Peace by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky provoked a couple of anxious glances. ‘I knew it,’ Y hissed as my number was drawn from her beret.

I felt guilty. I am quite new to the group and don’t want to drive the stalwarts away.

Because of the book’s 1200 pages our chairwoman decided on 300 pages-a-go over four sessions.

At the meetings we say what we will, then vote out of ten on content, then style, then enjoyableness. Last time three of us, with only 900 pages to go, chirruped ten ten ten as we tried to describe the scale and vision of the journey we felt ourselves to be on – how truth accumulates, how illusory personal freedom proves to be…

The other three were fed up. Two two two they intoned, like Amy Winehouse declining rehab. It was heavy in every sense, all that French, and all those unpronounceable names and all those battles and padding.

It was felt that the ayes should go it alone – we’d stay late after the next session to discuss 300 more pages between ourselves. I’m glad I’m with the ayes and not the nays. Absorption into this epic stops my own life racing away. But it’s strange for me, moving from the Napoleonic wars of 1805-12 to - as research for Edith Cavell - the erupting of Europe a hundred years after that. A continuum of carnage, destruction, grief and pain. Old wars elide with new wars, the war appetite stays, the cost’s not counted and new approaches aren’t made.

Talking with a friend about the breaking of relationship, she used the metaphor of hitting an ice floe and how you see that ice floe looming. And I said yes, and that crashing into it wasn’t because of lack of love or intelligence, but often had something to do with childhood catastrophe and the learning that love and disaster elide. And we sort of agreed that once it had been hit, there was no drawing back from it, no counselling would work, there was no route round.

Then going over this with a wise gay friend he said that our generation – his and mine – in our formative years had our deepest desires met with homophobia, scorn and silence. There was no one to talk to. It meant we internalised pain and were on our own. He said thank goodness it’s easier now.

Then he gave me a very good bit of advice: You should put a rubber band round your wrist and every time you find yourself thinking of the person you know you must forget, twang the band and make yourself think of something else. It gives a sort of sharp Wake-up-snap-out-of-it feel. It’s curiously effective, though these days, for myself, I’m far too grown up and busy for such twanging.