Salley Vickers is a wonderful novelist, but also a delightful, witty, kind, and (occasionally) sardonic soul. She also has magnificently good taste (I can tell, because her tastes and mine so frequently coincide). She also has a particularly sane vision of reality, which comes out in both her fiction and her conversation.
Excuse the hemming and hawing and broken syntax of her hapless interlocutor. The poor man seems to swing between spells of glib and fluently eloquent persiflage and spells of awkward, plodding, abortive, distracted, and weirdly semaphoric sentence fragments. Something to do, no doubt, with circadian rhythms, cycles of caffeine ingestion, and periodically insurgent feelings of bashfulness.
Excuse also the occasional respiratory noises picked up by a very sensitive microphone. As has been documented now with tedious regularity, my lungs were permanently affected by the illness that descended on me early in 2014, and in cold weather they still tend to labor a bit. The temperature here sank precipitately the day before our conversation. Next time—and there will be a next time—I shall adjust the equipment accordingly.
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