I’ve taken to smiling at strangers – road sweepers and the squashed on the tube. I doubt it’s construed as anything more amorous than senility or a facial tic, but it’s a reciprocal thing because when people are nice to me in the smallest of ways it makes my day.

Like last week I went shopping in the Apple store for a monitor to go with my laptop. It made a bulky package and the nice young man who’d explained things to me and made sure I’d got the right bits and cables, carried this package to Oxford Circus station – and all the way down the station steps too.

Later in the day a neighbour knocked on my door with a bunch of jonquils and eucalyptus because I’d had some viral infection, which had left me rather low. I guess these are the sort of things Wordsworth had in mind in Tintern Abbey when he wrote about ‘little, nameless unremembered acts of kindness and of love’ being the best part of a good person’s life.

And then among my email was one from an English teacher in Basra who wanted a copy of Mrs Keppel and Her Daughter. He couldn’t do an international money transfer from Iraq. I posted a copy, emailed him the registration reference and asked if life was in any way tolerable in Basra now. He replied ‘Basra is the city of the beheaded’ and sent his love and prayers for peace.

Then I saw that tv documentary about Tony Blair and listened to him saying how he’d had to be the one to make the decisions and he couldn’t do that through consensus, and he did what he thought was right and how important God was to him. I felt bad for having voted for him. I grieve if I’ve contributed in any infinitesimal way to creating a city of the beheaded. I wish leaders would look down their noses for guidance to the benign and loving wishes of us ordinary people and not up in the sky for God. I’m not going to vote again – it’s a double cross.

In a her book about Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes Janet Malcolm writes of biography as a thieving trade:

‘The biographer at work is like the professional burglar, breaking into a house, rifling through certain drawers that he has good reason to think contain the jewelry and money and triumphantly bearing his loot away. …. The reader’s amazing tolerance (which he would extend to no novel written half as badly as most biographies) makes sense only when seen as a kind of collusion between him and the biographer in an excitingly forbidden undertaking…’

In her latest book Two Lives – Gertrude and Alice Janet Malcolm makes no reference to me or to my book Gertrude and Alice – reprinted five times. None the less within thirty very short pages fifteen of her anecdotes are the same as those used in my book, and of the ten photographs reproduced by her, five are the same as those used by me. Perhaps such use is coincidental and even if it isn’t the anecdotes and photographs are at source archival. But the title wasn’t from any archive. The ‘certain drawer’ it came from was my head.

Do I mind? Well I feel a bit duffed up. Am I glad to read Philip Hensher’s thumbs down review of Janet Malcolm’s book in The Daily Telegraph, his opinion that Stein’s life was interesting enough to ‘merit the ongoing series of books, many quite excellent’ about her and Alice B. Toklas and his verdict that ‘Diana Souhami’s irresistibly charming Gertrude and Alice wins by a neck in a hectic field. Malcolm’s book is much less ambitious, abandoning narrative biography for some sketches of the problems in Stein scholarship.’

Well up to a point I’m glad. But I didn’t choose to go into the burglary business, or to go in for hectic races. My hopes as a writer were and remain quite other. But perhaps Janet Malcolm doesn’t know I exist, or that I wrote a book called Gertrude and Alice and introductions to the Folio Society edition of The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook and the Bantam Classics edition of Stein’s Three Lives. And I’m sure she doesn’t know I wrote a radio play A Horse Called Gertrude Stein where the mare in a point to point sits down while the other competitors race round her.What’s the point of grumping. None of it lasts. On to the next minor offering in a thieving world.

The sound of street bands used make my mother snivel. I seem to have inherited the gene. It’s hard to live in the Barbican and not be lured out on Lord Mayor’s Day by the oom pa pahs and pom pom poms and I was tearful in Gresham Street as the procession rolled by: elderly men, in gilded carriages, looking daft in ermine and plumes; shire horses from Peterborough and greys from Bedfordshire as posh as any painted by Stubbs; volunteers from St Bartholomew’s hospital hobbling along dressed as old-time nurses; terriers and mongrels from the Rescue Home trotting purposefully under the banner ‘A dog is for life not just for Christmas’. And of course cadets, marines and fusiliers banging and clashing and blowing in various uniforms of combat. Their faces looked so young and whatever it was they were doing, they looked determined to get it right.

I thought of August Sander’s photographs of uniformed Nazi cadets – the innocence in their eyes and how the Nazis burned his work. I thought of Guantanamo Bay, Camp X-ray, razor wire, orange images of men who are hooded, shackled, gagged, masked. We are not allowed to see the faces of these prisoners.