Right, you need to know that this sudden obsession with Captain Corelli started last Tuesday – but I only realised that when I read back my diary on Sunday, and found that I’d written the following:

‘For some reason I started thinking about Captain Corelli’s Mandolin today – partly, I think, because Louis de Bernieres was mentioned in Writers’ News, and partly because the creative writing tutor mentioned it yesterday as an example of a wonderful book which was spoilt by a terrible ending which should really have been edited out. And I thought – I must read the description of Correlli again – because I think he was like the Crazy Frog – well, that’s how I’ll picture him from now on, anyway.’

By Friday, I’d forgotten this, and I just knew that I had this urge to find a physical description of Corelli, so I started skim-reading it (in front of the fire, after a sloe gin cocktail and half a bottle of red…)
This is what I wrote in my diary then:

‘I have my own mental image of Corelli, I know what he’s like and who he’s like, but I don’t know why - I thought it must have come from the book, but I couldn’t find it. Quite small, definitely, and not dark, not at all Italian, blue eyes, fair hair. Not Nicholas Cage either – I’ve never seen the film but I’ve read the reviews that said he was completely wrong for the part. Not at all handsome (‘the antithesis of handsome’, as we were discussing on Lady Lucy’s blog the other week), but definitely charming.

I wouldn’t say it’s one of my favourite books, though I did enjoy it, and maybe it would repay re-reading. I read it in 2000. I started it in Montreal, read it on the plane black, then I was stranded at Paris airport by a 24 hour air traffic control strike (it was an Air France flight that I’d found cheap on the net). I ended up coming home by Eurostar, trying to read on the train and falling asleep. I think I finished it on family holiday in Crete.
That was an amazing year for me. In September I spoke at a conference in Hungary and I THINK a young Italian (Paulo was his name) tried to make a pass at me, but being me, in my usual hopeless what-do-I-do-now way, I succeeded in putting him off…
Anyway, HE wasn’t Corelli, that was just an aside…
That was a year when life seemed full of possibilities… but life seems to open these wonderful doors only to close them again. And I still haven’t found what I’m looking for. But I can see Antonio Corelli in my mind’s eye, and hear him playing his mandolin for me.'