Worker wasps and male wasps are in a strange state. Sated on over-ripe plums, disorientated by cold, they’re buzzing and irritable and at the end of their lives.

I was told to be at Cheltenham Town Hall before nine in the morning to go through technical things for my talk scheduled for ten. At the hotel I got up before seven to get ready leisurely, go through notes, have coffee. At first I thought they were flies in the small claustrophobic room. Then I realised they were cross wasps and phoned the desk. The night receptionist said he’d be right up. I wrapped a towel round me. It wasn’t the sort of hotel to provide flowing white bathrobes. He zapped three wasps with the room-service prospectus and scooped them onto hotel writing paper to show the duty manager. He kept saying he was so sorry and I kept saying it wasn’t his fault. I felt disadvantaged in this small space with him and the wasps and me without my clothes on. As he closed the door the buzzing resumed. With autumn wasp-zapping, brothers and sterile sisters go for cover until the war’s over then come out angrier than ever. I phoned again. The young man returned. I think he was from Somalia or Ethiopia. Anyway he had those tall thin serene looks. I hoped he wouldn’t think my calls a ruse by a more than middle-aged lone woman to get him into her hotel room. He zapped again. He got four more. He said he was so sorry. I said it wasn’t his fault. He closed the door. The buzzing resumed.

After his fourth visit I stopped being nice or awkward. It was getting late. I didn’t fancy going under the shower. I said I wanted another room. He said he couldn’t do anything until the duty manager arrived, but he was sure I wouldn’t be charged for my stay. I said I didn’t care about the money, it wasn’t billed to me anyway, and all I wanted was to get showered and dressed and out of the bloody room.

He came back and zapped again. His technique was very good. It was the way he kept his eye on his prey then went for it. It occurred to me Basil Fawlty would have zapped badly and I’d have streaked inconsolably through the breakfast room and Sybil would have had a thing or two to say. The young man took away more corpses on the hotel stationery. I was worse than discordant. The duty manager phoned. I said I must must must must must move into a wasp-free room. I told her I was a writer who was giving a talk and this wasn’t acceptable. It was hell on earth. She said she was very sorry but the hotel was full, but if I went down to breakfast she’d have the room fumigated by ten o’clock.

It occurred to me Basil Fawlty would have fumigated badly and I’d have arrived at the Town Hall an hour late for my event and covered in DDT. I couldn’t be bothered to tell her that not only was I a Literary Festival writer, but that my talk was at ten o’clock. What did she care about me and my art and my career and my public. Two more wasps had chosen to rage against the dying of the light in the bath. I pulled on my clothes, put on some make up and huffed off, wild, unwashed, unbreakfasted and unprepared. When I returned in the afternoon for my suitcase the wasps were quiet. The duty manager knocked twenty pounds off the bill. A pound a wasp perhaps.

An exhibition by the Burmese artist Htein Lin at Asia House in New Cavendish Street ends on 13 October. It’s of paintings done secretly between 1998 and 2004 when he was in Mandalay then Myaungmya prisons, accused by the military government of planning opposition protests and of supporting Aung San Suu Kyi.

I was alone with his work yesterday afternoon in the gallery. Without canvas he used material torn from the cotton prison uniforms. Friends smuggled in acrylic or dyes but what to paint with was a problem. He used a syringe, cigarette lighter, toothpaste cap, a cup, a toothbrush, his fingers and feet. He said painting let him breathe and was no air in his cell. His paintings swirl with colour and defiance, as a fight against entrapment. The peacock is a symbol of liberation in Burma and his Escaping Soul is like the tail of a peacock splayed from a man’s head. He paints prisoners meditating to Buddha, or maimed and shackled, or queuing for food. He paid to smuggle his paintings out. One warder bribed to do this took the money then thought the paintings were coded escape maps so burned them. Htein Lin’s marriage didn’t survive his six-year confinement. But he’s now living in London with his second wife, the then British ambassador to Burma Victoria Bowman. Buddha, brave monks, Aung San Suu Kyi, Htein Lin, Victoria Bowman, this is the true Burma I like to think.

I went to the exhibition because John Berger spoke of it and I’d heard him reading from his new book the night before. John Berger’s an inspiration as a writer and a man. His conscience is always there yet he writes of the space between words, the unspoken, the inflexion, paradox, silence. And he always makes cherries and greengages and the spread of a bird’s wings seem as wonderful as they truly are. It’s strange to hear him answering questions. He becomes inarticulate as he struggles not to use the wrong words.

His new book is letters from a woman to her partner in prison. He reaches out to prisoners everywhere. Somewhere else he writes of how ‘literature is inimical to all hierarchies and to separate fact and imagination, event and feeling, protagonist and narrator, is to stay on dry land and never put to sea’. I like it when he writes of art as revenge to the innocent, or when he quotes Andrea Dworkin whom he admired, saying ‘I have no patience with the untorn, anyone who hasn’t weathered rough weather, fallen apart, been ripped to pieces, put herself back together, big stitches, jagged cuts, nothing nice. Then something shines out. But the ones all shined up on the outside, the ass wigglers, I’ll be honest, I don’t like them. Not at all.’

Which brings me to myself and my own dissatisfaction – with this blog and website stuff to begin with. I believe I use it to try to shine up on the outside. Self-promotion. For example those reviews I quote – I could have included a few stinkers but I left them out. Maybe I’m trying blogging as a valediction – goodbye to computing, emailing, texting. One more clamouring voice signifying very little.

I’ve had a rough weather year. Time for guts and honour, big stitches, to make a change, to move, buy a ticket, put to sea. I’ll put Berger in one pocket and Dworkin in the other have some currency in my bumbag and think of Htein Lin as I sail away.

There’s a new horror down in the countryside on a par with foot and mouth and blue tongued cows and the despair of the fox the badger and the deer. Romanys threaten to set up camp. They’ve bought a field, put three caravans in it and applied to the District Council to bring in more. Residents of the nearest village – a couple of miles away – are more than agitated. They’ve set up an action group. The presence of Romanys will mean flooding, collisions, children walking along roads, loss of village amenities, travellers in laybys and on unauthorised land, problems with disposal of effluent, water supply contamination, increased traffic. And what of the schools and the local infrastructure. The council should move these travellers on to somewhere suitable that isn’t an area of natural beauty.

I keep quiet. But at night on Late Junction on Radio 3, I was with the Romanys as I heard their poems and music and stories of a dying itinerant community – children of the wind.

I’m not a candidate for the LongPen. My queue for book signings at the Edinburgh Festival wasn’t unmanageably long, my wrist didn’t ache by the end of it, nor did legions of disappointed fans leave Scotland with their copies of Coconut Chaos uninscribed by me.

The LongPen isn’t for all of us. But VIP writers can now sign books without tipping out to the Festival yurt. ‘By using the LongPen instead of taking a round trip flight from New York to Edinburgh, a writer saves the atmosphere over one tonne of carbon emissions.’ It’s the invention of Margaret Atwood. I didn’t see it in action but it was there at Edinburgh and I gather it works something like this: The author – the celebrity author – is on video and has a sort of electronic writing tablet in front of her or him. Across the seas, in the yurt or bankrupt bookshop, there’s a LongPen kiosk. The fan goes into the kiosk with the bought book. By video the fan gives an inscription request to the author: The author writes this on the tablet and the robotic pen comes down and copies it on the bared titlepage! ‘Suck it Henry. Margaret Atwood. Edinburgh’.

Gosh! And it’s a legal signature. Authentic. The Real McCoy.

Where will it end. Why stop at LongPen signings. Why not sessions with Ruth Rendell, cosy at home, robotically nibbling the ears of distant fans with her robotic EarNibbler or A.C.Grayling varnishing admirers’ toes with LongVarnish.

Our virtual world is out of hand. Efforts at togetherness with those we’ll never know, define our isolation. We’re turning into machines. But maybe we’re machines anyway. For some reason I’m reminded of how when St Teresa of Avila’s coffin was opened nine months after she died, the Father Provincial cut off her left hand and took it to a monastery in Lisbon. Her right foot’s in Rome, there’s a middle finger in Paris, one of her shoulder bones is in Brussels and some of her teeth are in Milan and Venice. Everlasting LongLife.

There’s trouble in the country and it’s not just blight on the tomatoes. Five calves which should have gone to the cattle market last Monday are still in the shed.

When a calf is born and taken from its mother, for about two days the cow bellows and the calf bleats. The cows are made to give birth each year, this bereavement is repeated and the cows are kept lactating and machine-milked all their lives.

If you want to know about human cruelty, visit the countryside. It’s a concentration camp for the product of the meat and dairy industry. There’s a euphemistic vocabulary for the imprisonment and killing of creatures.

J.M.Coetzee asks for a change of heart towards animals. He believes that children provide the brightest hope - that a glimpse into the slaughterhouse would make them vegan.

I wish we were all vegan and ate artichokes braised in broth with broad beans fennel and polenta, or mushroom risotto, or sweet potatoes, or okra stewed with tomatoes, or apple tart and brownies. I wish we’d free animals into a better life.

Pigs have the intelligence of dogs. Scratch them under the chin and they laugh. Years ago on Lundy Island there was a tame sheep called Happiness. She’d graze with the others but was exempt from slaughter. If you stood in her field with corn flakes in your pocket and called her name she’d come running.

Perhaps farm animals are aware of the violence we plan for them. Perhaps they communicate their fate to each other. When I walk the lanes I try not to meet their eyes.

The five calves wait in a shed. Until the f and m scare ends they’ve another few days of a short non-life. Escalope Milanese?

We now know, or anyway have been told, that to save the polar bear from fire and brimstone we must wash out our sardine cans, drink the tapwater, eat beans, turn off the standby lights and get on our bikes.

Le last Weekend in Paris for me coincided with the arrival of Velib – a ‘self-service bicycle transit system’. Throughout the city, ten thousand bikes are now tethered at 750 locations. They’re ugly cumbersome things - a cross between a moped and a walking frame – and their intrepid users look fearful for their lives as they wobble down the cobbles. Paris apparently has 371 kilometres of cycling lanes. For a euro you can buy a one-day Velib card, a weekly card for 5 or an annual one for 29. The first half hour’s then free and it’s an additional euro for every half hour after that. What you owe is on the bike’s meter when you thankfully return it to a parking stand.

Apparently the system’s worked well in Strasbourg, Rennes and La Rouchelle. Is it feasible for London? Somehow I doubt it and not just because here motorists hate cyclists, and taxi drivers view it as sport to mow them down. I suspect many Londoners might steal, vandalise, abuse and misuse these city bikes. There’d be bits of Velib adorning parlour walls like the antlers of stags. Lots of them would be dredged from the bed of the Thames. They’d provide under-the-kitchen-sink pipework for otherly qualified immigrant plumbers. Yobs would make a show of twisting them like liquorice to boast their macho strength. Naughty boys would vandalise their meters and scratch obscene imprecations about rival football clubs. It just wouldn’t work. There’s something wrong with us Londoners when it comes to shared property: supermarket trolleys, phone booths, trains, buses. We don’t love our city in the civic way Parisians seem to. Probably because it’s uglier, wildly expensive, uncohesive and unkind. Under the rule of law, we accommodate and tolerate but we don’t do sharing.

Mind you Parisians don’t do bike helmets. I don’t know what the projected accident figures are. By the end of the year they’ll apparently have 20,600 Velib bikes at 1,451 ranks. If each bike gets used 5 times a day that’s a lot of wobbling round the boulevards.

Reading my instructions for the Cheltenham Literature Festival this October, I remembered my last visit in 2001. On the train back to London, in a first class carriage (the publisher was paying), I sat alongside Nina Bawden and Austen Kark. It was their familiar way of travelling: they had senior railcards and were comfortably off. They spread their books and newspapers on the table between them. Their devotion to each other was easy to read. It was of the sort that decades of loving kindness brings.

He faced the engine. She was wearing red shoes with a pointed heel and black fishnet tights. Though in her seventies she was still beautiful. For some reason I mentioned the World Service as a boon for insomniacs. I hadn’t known that for years he’d been director of it. They spoke of their apartment in Nauplion and how she liked writing there. He showed me his book Attic in Greece. He’d endured bouts of hospital treatment – as had I. I foraged for teas from the buffet car. A running gag punctuated the journey - the inspector couldn’t work his ticket machine. He kept coming back and saying Maybe this time.

When I got home I ordered Nina Bawden’s novel Ruffian on the Stair. I thought of them both on and off. It had been one of those pleasant, life-enhancing encounters that make travel worthwhile.

The following year, on 10 May 2002 they got the 12.45 train to Cambridge from King’s Cross. They were going to a friend’s birthday party.

Next day, returning from Devon, I stopped for coffee on the A303 at a Little Chef. Part of the obligatory ghastliness was a free copy of the Daily Mail. I cried out when I read of his death and her serious injury in the train crash at Potters Bar. In my mind’s eye I saw them again - the comfortable carriage, newspapers and books spread between them, their loving familiarity.

Months later I heard Nina Bawden twice on radio news. She corrected the interviewer who spoke of her losing her husband. I didn’t lose my husband, she said. He was killed. In another interview I heard her say My husband was a conscientious man, he was killed by someone who was not conscientious.

I didn’t see David Hare’s play The Permanent Way about the privatisation of the railways. It was 75 per cent verbatim and Nina Bawden’s was the main voice in it. Nor have I read her book Dear Austen ‘a letter to my husband who was killed in the train crash at Potter’s Bar on 10 May 2002, to tell him what happened both then and afterwards…’ I’ll read them both when the sick feeling’s gone. I do wonder about it though – the elision between carelessness, incompetence, greed, immorality and crime. The unacceptable face of capitalism? Loose nuts on the points 2182A – and not only there it would seem. Insufficient maintenance, no proper inspection, no one at Jarvis taking responsibility. Not my job, cut the costs, up the profit, take the money and get home quick.

It took twelve hours to get from Cornwall to London last Saturday. Arriving early morning at Penzance, my friend and I were told there were no trains to Paddington. It was the rain at Reading. Come back tomorrow said a lugubrious man in blue. My friend was flying to Pisa on the tomorrow, so we decided not to believe what we didn’t want to hear.

Our disbelief proved right. After omelettes and hours of sitting with The Cornishman a train came. We didn’t know where it was going but we got on it. It collected the desperate from St Erth, St Austell, St Everywhere, and terminated, which is what trains do, at Plymouth. About a thousand of us then stood for ever on platform 7. At five-minute intervals a recorded voice said ‘This is an important announcement: smoking is not permitted anywhere on the station’. This was the only customer information. I am not a smoker, but what with the waiting and the not knowing, and the constant reference to it, I began to feel I could use a cigarette.

I talked to William, a nice man with a very large rucksack and a dog called Polly. She was from a rescue home and had a resigned air. William said she wasn’t very bright for a border collie, but that she’d enjoyed her holiday in Cornwall because the landlady at the B & B gave her an extra sausage for breakfast each morning.

William kept avidly texting and talking from behind his hand into some sort of smart phone. He was very knowledgeable about the railways, the evils of privatisation, the demerits of the various train companies, the state of the rolling stock and the track. Perhaps because I was interested in all he had to say, he confided he worked for First Great Western, but didn’t want the people on the platform to know. He feared violence. As he was clearly getting information from a train guru in a parallel universe I felt privileged to have won his confidence. Swathes of time passed. He texted and phoned then told me that in thirty minutes a Virgin train for Bristol would arrive, but that I shouldn’t get on it. I should wait for the 13.41 First Great Western to Paddington via Exeter. The 1400 advertised on the monitor wouldn’t happen, he explained. Station monitors were controlled from a central site and the operators, wherever and whoever they were, didn’t know what was happening where.

An announcement then came over the Public Address system. It was not about smoking. A train for Exeter was to arrive on platform 7. My friend and I decided to get on it whatever William said. We wanted to be anywhere that wasn’t Plymouth. The train headed in but stopped at the far end of the platform. It only had one carriage. I’d never seen a one-carriage train before. William explained its provenance, but my interest in railway history waned as I watched the panic scrum.

I asked him why rain at Reading should bring the whole network into chaos. He explained that the drains didn’t work. The pipes were full of roots. In the olden days this got sorted, but not now. And as rain was an act of God, train companies had no legal liability to sort things: no refunds, no alternative transport. Most real railway people had now gone, he said, trainees were now instructed by trainees.

The Virgin train came and went taking William and Polly. It was packed to capacity with people squashed in the aisles. My friend worried about our remaining on the platform, but I reassured her about the unadvertised 13.41. But then a train with two carriages arrived unannounced. It was pointing south and it put down roots on platform 7. My friend asked its driver where he was going and he said he didn’t know.

Our source of information switched from William to Hans’s father. Hans was from Vlaardingen in the Netherlands from where his father was texting information to him about the southwest network. He told him to avoid Bristol because there was nothing running between there and London.

Time passed, the 13.41 didn’t arrive, nor the advertised 1400. Hans said that in Vlaardingen railway travel was five times cheaper than here, trains always arrived on a designated platform, and that if a train was crowded people moved down the carriage to make room.

After an eternity another Virgin train pulled in on platform 8. It was going to Bristol. We scrambled aboard. It was packed to capacity. At Bristol there was a stampede to I didn’t know where. Down steps, up steps lugging cases. My friend told me to follow a man with a green suitcase. She said he was going to London. We squashed into a capacity packed departing train, commended our luck, bought much-needed wine from the buffet and listened to stories far worse than our own. A passenger from Truro told me a man in his compartment had been thrown off the train for smoking. I asked if those in charge had waited for a station stop before despatching him.

At Paddington no District, Circle, Hammersmith or Central line trains were running. I supposed it was the rain at Reading. I hope Hans got to Harwich in time for the midnight ferry. It is said that travel broadens the mind.

Territorial encroachment is a cause of war. Green wheelie bins abound in Cornwall. In Mousehole, a huddle of tiny cottages without sheds or yards, which when the sea was still a home to fish were lived in by fishermen, Monday is bin day.

A friend has a cottage there. Her wheelie bin’s time-honoured home is up against her flank wall by her coal hod. But since Mrs Pinkerton who lives in the Midlands bought ‘Caan Du’ opposite and renamed it ‘Fisherman’s Nook’ my friend’s wheelie bin has not been in its rightful place. In spite of protest, each time she goes to Mousehole it’s been moved. On her last visit with me the bin was up the alley and bright blue pots of busy lizzies were lined against her wall. We fought back, moved the pots, chained and padlocked the wheelie bin to the drainpipe and read Mrs P’s email in one breath:

I hope you don't mind me contacting you about this, I have just had an email from our caretaker about our cottage and one of the things she mentioned is your wheelie bin. She is concerned that your wheelie bin has recently been fastened with a chain and padlock to the drainpipe so it can't be moved for refuse collection. I don't know whether you were aware of this?

Out of courtesy to you, I have asked our caretaker to check every week if our visitors have put rubbish in your bin and to put it out for collection if it has been used and to return it after collection. Obviously she now cannot move it as she doesn't have a key for the padlock, so if any rubbish is deposited it will have to stay in the bin until someone who has a key can move it. I just hope that this does not create an environmental problem and I thought I had better let you know about this as soon as possible. In the meantime I'm just not sure what to do about rubbish placed in your bin. What are your thoughts about this?

Dear Mrs Pinkerton

Your repeated moving of our green bin from the site it has always occupied has irritated us.

It butts against the side of our house beside our coal hod. That has been its site for the past ten years.

Now, each time we visit, we find it moved. When you compounded this by putting plant pots in its place against our wall we decided to buy a chain by way of deterrent.

It is a pity if you are unable to prevent your tenants putting rubbish in it for it has a large 54 painted on the lid. As for the environmental problem you say you fear, I suggest your cleaner removes rubbish put in our bin by your tenants and puts it in your own bin.

I have contributed to this conflict by giving poor strategic advice. Neither side shines. Prolonged negotiation should have been the preferred course. One of my unperformed plays (see Other Work), is called The Ditch is my Boundary. It’s a neighbourhood piece that ends in shoot-out from up a tree. Mrs Pinkerton is right to choose not to pursue this email exchange. I wonder where the offending bin will be when next I visit Mousehole.