Melvyn Bragg interviews Saul Bellow on TV about The Dean’s December. Bellow grandly puts shit on sociologists, psychologists and criminologists for their failure to cure what’s wrong with society. V gives an admiring cheer. I am disappointed and say little. ‘I think,’ says V, ‘you weren’t very interested in what he was talking about.’ I realise I am withholding so as not to rock V’s boat. So I say, ‘I’ll tell you what I really think. I think he’s a windbag.’ To my surprise when we discuss this V comes a long way towards my point of view. So we are not dug in. Our egos are not in charge of our ideas. We try to list writers who became windy. Hemingway. Henry James. Faulkner? (I haven’t read him.) We agree that windy-ness is a male failing on the whole, and that women’s failing tends to be wetness. ‘Your mate Carver,’ he says, ‘is not windy at all.’ Is windy-ness to do with ambition? Is it also an American failing? Chekhov, we agree, is never windy. We decide to go away for the weekend. To have ‘an adventure’.