THERE was a good lot of sniffing and sulking and putting on a brave face among all those of us writers who were not invited to be part of the Irish Diaspora at the Frankfurt Book Fair.
Depending on the circumstances, we were calm and measured and said that of course the Arts Council and their secret advisers must choose who they wished to choose, it was a free world after all. And then at other times there was heavy muttering and hissing. It was an immensely bonding experience - huge warmth has grown up among those of us not chosen to represent Ireland, while we put on a pleasant public face and wished the whole endeavour nothing but success.
And in several cases the sense of being passed over was greatly minimised because German publishers invited us anyway, so we were safely wrapped in our own cocoon members-of-the-wedding, so to speak. You could, of course, go to the Frankfurt Book Fair on your own, just as I once went to a dress dance on my own in 1958, heartbroken because I hadn't been invited. I went round the ballroom and sold raffle tickets and danced occasionally with people and ate bits of supper off people's plates and went home on the last bus and nobody knew that I wasn't a glittering invitee.
But who has the energy to do that nowadays, just to look good in someone else's eyes? And whose eyes are we talking about anyway? Nobody is looking at us - they are all exhausted, feet worn to stumps moving around the huge halls. It's a place that would depress the heart out of anyone who ever wrote a book. To see that amount of competition and effort, and to hear of the cynical way authors fall in and out of favour - not the stuff that confidence is made of.
But we went anyway, because it was as if someone ... in this case German publishers ... had waved a wand and said "You shall go to the fair".
When we met for the odd glass of desperately sweet sparkling wine which was offered at every step, we allowed ourselves the ritual sulk and remembered the story of the man whose much hated mother-in-law and much loved new car were about to go over the cliff. Did you hope they went over or they were saved?
Did we want the Diaspora crowd to be a huge success, which would make us feel terrific about being Irish? Did we want the event to be a damp squib so they would feel racked with guilt and shame and remorse for not including us?
Not much of a contest: we were patriotic custard-hearts, we wanted the glory for Ireland, and we got it. Very often the fair has had a theme but people rarely remember what it was. But this was not the case this year's theme Ireland and the Diaspora - what with the Irish President, Mrs Robinson, and the Nobel Prize-winner, Mr Heaney, on stage. People knew that the Irish were there.
So, sulk over, we all settled down to the fair. There were absolutely monumental amounts of food wherever you turned. Tea parties to meet journalists. Tea parties, I wondered to myself?
But I said nothing. It was not my show for a start, and over there maybe they love tea. There were huge tiered cake stands with smoked salmon and cream cheese sandwiches, strawberry shortbread and profiteroles. Amazingly I didn't get to eat any of them because I never stopped talking, and you couldn't really ask for a doggy bag.
And there were huge cocktail parties where anxious guests agonised about whether we were on the A-list or the B-list. A woman took off her shoes and stood up on a chair to investigate. She called down that she thought we were all right, she had seen several politicians, a major actor, a minor film star and a lot of money men. This must be the A-list. So we attacked the canape's with relief.
Then there were dinners. I met Dick Francis (as I thought) and gushed at him a lot about his book and reminded him where we met in London on a cruise on the Thames. And the more I said the less he said. So I looked at him sadly.
"Am I talking too much?" I asked humbly.
We will never know.
He was not Dick Francis the thriller writer, he was the imposing head waiter, who had come over to direct me to the buffet table.
I spoke a bit to a troublesome woman - a glamour-puss, a foreign author. I immediately knew she was troublesome, because she told me she had slept with two men in this room quite recently and they both had lice.
This was very alarming, I said, and unusual.
"Not so unusual," she snapped. "Most men have lice." She saw my puzzled face. "It's the plural of louse, is it not? Louses, men are louses."
My face seemed to clear at this stage. They were lice they didn't have lice. For some strange reason that seemed much more acceptable. I stopped scratching my arm.
Then she asked me were there many men in the room with whom I had slept. I pretended to give the matter some thought, and looked at 400 strangers speculatively.
I thought that possibly there weren't.
She nodded, totally understanding. "I know, just the publishers like all of us," she said and left me because I was as dull as ditchwater.
I met a man who said I would not be interested in him at all because he wrote non-fiction. I wondered what kind. "Non-fiction," he said again. I thought this was a bit like saying non-Catholic.
I explained this to him, and he looked at me in amazement.
"I have never been in any part of the universe where people referred to other people as non-Catholics," he said disapprovingly.
I remembered the Diaspora and how we were all meant to be modern now, so I didn't say to him that if he had been around these parts he might well have come across the phrase only too often.
So of course I chickened out. "Neither have I," I lied.
`ARE you feeling unwell, would you like a schnapps?" he asked me kindly.
An American couple were feeling the strain.
"This guy said we should go to Zurich, he says you can eat your dinner off the sidewalk." The man was eager and red-faced about it all.
"I don't want to eat my dinner off the sidewalk," said the woman whose shoes were too tight, and who had drunk three glasses of sweet sparkling wine too many.
"It was a metaphor, honey," the man said.
"No it was not a metaphor, you turkey, it was a figure of speech denoting the cleanliness of the city. And let me tell you I still don't want to go there."
"Honey, I shall surely be most surprised if you get anyone to go anywhere with you, with the mood that you're in," he said.
They had another 36 hours and possibly, but by no means definitely, a future ahead of them. I wondered whether I should lean over and beg her to take off her shoes, and eat something to soak up all that wine. But it was a night where people kept being told extraordinary things and were not always delighted to hear them. Just at that moment a woman told me that she believed I had taught her mother at school. We worked out that the woman herself was almost 60, and her mother had not been a mature student, but she had been taught by a pleasant person with no features and somehow they had always thought that it had been me.
At dinner I sat next to a very nice man. I asked him had he ever met anyone with no features, he said his first wife had no features in her face.
"Was that why you left her?" I asked, wretched to the heart.
"No - she left me, and I think of her almost all of the time, but we will not discuss this with my second wife," he said.