Diary - Isle of Thanet Gazette 27th February 2004

You'll hear me shrieking: I thought of it first

Imagine being the first to come up with a brilliant, ground-breaking idea, and nobody notices. Picture hatching a great invention only to find someone else claiming it as their own. Visualise seeing your very own stroke of genius in the hands of another. Spreading through the world to great acclaim, media coverage and the accumulation of vast fortunes. It is happening to me. It started with a newspaper cutting from the Moscow Times. One Dmitry Petrov had started an agency and was selling alibis to cheating spouses. Well! As regular readers of this column will know - for I bang on about it with unfailing monotony - my novel, Perfect Alibis, launched this idea on the world last May (and I had conceived it years before that.) But hey - look what they say about great minds and fools. So maybe old Dmitry had had the same idea. I laughed, I shrugged. I had a go at tracking Dmitry down but he didn't speak English. Michael Bywater does. Mr Bywater writes a column in the Independent. And just before Christmas he came up with a clever wheeze. He proffered the concept of a service to get philanderers off the hook. It involved fake phone numbers and background noise, a nifty little scheme by which you could be on a foreign beach up to no good while pretending to be at a sales conference somewhere else entirely. MB appeared to be claiming this idea as his own. "But, but... " I spluttered at the newsprint. I emailed him. "Did I appear to you in a dream or something?" I enquired . He sent me a highly amusing reply. Which didn't answer the question.

Then another article arrived from a French paper, then a German one. These agencies are everywhere! The Berlin outfit offers to send text messages to corroborate a story. I thought of that too! In this country's Times, last Friday, there was a whole page devoted to how to get away with an affair (the very subtitle of my own work) containing all sorts of tips very similar to...... I emailed that journalist too. One Jonathan Gornall, the Microwave Man, and he phoned me this morning. He had a very sexy voice - I can quite see why he would know about such things - and was good enough to promise my book a mention in his next column. (If you happen to get The Times it should be there today.) We had a brief exchange about the way things are going infidelity-wise. We agreed it's on the up. Personally I can see a future where everyone is at it. Where agencies have sprung up on every street corner - or website anyway - to provide services to the unfaithful. Where the founders of same grow obscenely rich on the proceeds. And then they'll be me. A mad, gin-swigging old lady, with multi-coloured hair and bizarre clothes - normally seen muttering to herself at bus stops or shrieking at passing cars. Repeating to anyone who'll listen and a lot of these who won't, the same words over and over: I THOUGHT OF IT FIRST!!!