To my surprise I am to be a lecturer on a Fred Olson cruise to Morocco and the Canaries in late November-early December this year. It came about because Shirley and I did a cruise in the Baltic in 2010 and I fell into conversation with the author Peter Gutteridge – a very nice fellow – and he gave me details of an agency who place guest speakers on cruise liners. And so here we are: it’s a first for me.

My half-dozen lectures have grown from my interest in frauds, fakes and charlatans: the same interest that has made me an avid writer of pastiches and parodies in my books and which led me to write How To Be A Charlatan. I may blog more about the content of these lectures at a future date, but for the present I can say that I’ve put a lot of work into them and they should be informative and amusing. For the moment I’m just contemplating the cruise and what it means.

I’m a cheerful, outgoing chap, but if someone said I was silly and prone to vanity, I don’t think I’d disagree. If with age I’ve become any wiser (about which I’m doubtful) it’s with respect to facing up to these facts about my own character and trying to deal with them.

So there we have it. You must imagine me standing on a stage in front of a few hundred happy cruisers. I open my gob…

I wonder what’s going to come out?