O diary, will I be able to cope with all this? Eleven literary seminars, workshops, book readings and poetry recitals in three days. Sometimes I wish the Nobel Literature prize was abolished so that people like me could get some rest. Year after year, I am called in to give my views on ‘unknown’ writers, poets and novelists from Afghanistan to Zambia, whose names I have not heard before. But then, that is the hazard of being a literary socialite. This morning, dear diary, when my pet cat went on mewing, I was nervous something would happen to upset me. And it did, Mo Yan of China won the Nobel prize for literature and within 40 minutes, newspapers, magazines and TV channels were calling asking for quotes. “Madam, what do you think of Mo Yan?” they started, which is when I cancelled my plans to have a dim sum lunch and began to invent quotes on Mo. Thanks to Google, God’s gift to mankind, I learnt Mo was a man and then it was easy to spin yarns about his love for democracy, freedom of speech and support for the dissident movement. These were convenient guesses which fortunately fetched the writer the Nobel and me, applause!