Writing by numbers

I've been reading a proof copy of a wonderful debut novel, Addition by Toni Jordan, which Sceptre have produced to promote their mass-market paperback after doing poorly with the trade paperback, possibly owing in part to a fairly atrocious cover.

Our narrator is Grace, who has a variant of OCD which compels her to count everything in her life and restricts her to those things which she can easily monitor. She is not portrayed as weak, as any sort of victim or as being in any sort of denial. She resists categorisation, marginalisation and any sort of mollycoddling. She is forthright, independent and possessed of a irresistibly sharp wit.

But that doesn't mean she's not vulnerable. She just knows her weaknesses and doesn't need a knight in shining armour to save her from herself. She's a well drawn, rounded character, someone I felt I was getting to know, not just a figure to observe travelling through a particular story. She feels as if she should have life beyond the page.

Her own personal version of numerology means that the fact that her full name, Grace Lisa Vandenburg, has the same number of letters as Seamus Joseph O'Reilly - 19 - means he's definitely got boyfriend potential. So it was with some excitement I noticed that mine does too! Only then did I realise that I seem to have fallen in love with a fictional character. Still, at least she's from someone else's imagination rather than my own, which is encouraging.

Sobering statistic of the week - with the possible exception of the revelation by the Zoological Society of London that humanity has killed off between a quarter and a third of the world's animal life since 1970 - is the survey of Italians which found that 68% of them want all Roma Gypsies deported from the country.

Last month's national elections resulted in the return to power of the odious Silvio Berlusconi, heading a right-wing coalition voted in largely owing to their hardline proposals with regard to immigration. Italian police have been charged with protection the Roma from victimisation, but so far this seems to have little impact on the abuse and violence.

We can't be complacent in the UK. London now has Boris Johnson as its Mayor - even though voting for Boris was as about as sensible as voting for a bowl of fruit - which no doubt has at least something to do with Tory attitudes to immigration. The real concern is the fact that the Mayoral Assembly now has a BNP member, since 5% of voters were taken in by their paranoid xenophobia, although I am gratified to learn that, thus far, the ghastly Richard Barnbrook is being ignored by his fellow Assembly members.

He was the BNP member who offered his support to Prima Ballerina Simone Clarke when she attacked for using her Arts Council-funded prominence to speak in support of the BNP. At the time she was dating a dancer of Cuban-Chinese descent, which Barnbrook said he didn't have problem with, but added that he thought it best that the pair didn't have children.

The following statement made to the BBC during his campaign should leave you in no doubt about his commitment to tolerance:

"You can be gay behind closed doors, you can be heterosexual behind closed doors, but you don't bring it onto the streets, demanding more rights for it."

This worrying incompassion, which seems set only to increase alarmingly given the sentiments offered in response by readers of the Daily Mail on their website and on the BBC website's Have Your Say page, will no doubt become even more prevalent as the world's resources become stretched. This week Barcelona, with their reservoirs filled to only 18% of their capacity, became the first European city to import water. I wonder how long it will be before we have tales of immigrants scrounging water.

I've been reading an anthology of Peter Ustinov's weekly columns for the defunct European newspaper written in 1990-91 and his calm wisdom is something which seems no longer to have a place in political debate.

He speaks with the compassion one would expect of such an active ambassador for UNICEF and does not shy from uncomfortable truths. In a piece revealing the widespread victimisation of the Maori community in New Zealand, he notes:

"Prejudice is an indefinable weed which is at its most insidious in the greenest of lawns."

With the West's lawns starting to brown, I fear that our feeble attempts to protect the world's poor and weak will be replaced by the frantic raising of drawbridges.