My JDOCD suffering wife can not, of course, resist anything connected with Johnny Depp which includes the rather second-rate movie The Astronaut’s Wife and I stumbled upon the book (pictured) this morning, obviously picked up second hand when she was in town yesterday.

Leaving aside the story and the quality of the prose – which as I have no intention of ever reading it will always remain in doubt – the book really does have a somewhat miraculous genesis. On the front cover, which you may just be able to make out, it claims:

Based upon the motion picture…

On the back cover however, are the words:

Now a major motion picture…

A bit of a paradox then this book.

Imagine for a moment you are Robert Goddard. You are a successful, best-selling author with a shelf-full of titles behind you and your latest effort has just been published.

You are on one of these book-signing, lecture and promotion tours. Every day a different town. Every night a different hotel. Every shop the same. You’re probably tired, have cramps from signing your name and just want to be home with the wife and kids.

You get into town, deliver a lecture and Q&A session at the local library and then it’s off to the local Waterstones for a signing session. And when you arrive you discover that while they have a stack of copies of your new book, there is just one copy of one previous book on the shelves.

And that’s going to happen to Robert Goddard tomorrow.

I might be wrong of course. Since I was there today, someone may have bought that single, lonely book.

I was skimming the BBC news website this lunchtime when a headline caught my eye. The average home, it said, owns 4.7 televisions. On reading the item it isn’t about television ownership at all – it’s an interesting piece about the links between consumerism, social attitudes and the new “therapy culture” which promotes simple misery to depression and mental ill-health.

If I am supposed to feel miserable because instead of 4.7 televisions in my house I have just the one then I am obviously missing something. To be honest, I sometimes feel miserable because I’ve got one at all. If you sit in front of the bloody thing on an average evening, switch on Sky and browse through the programme guide, the feeling of misery gets more intense with each passing page. It’s not just because absolutely none of it is worth wasting my time on. It’s more that as a so-called civilized society we have become so culturally bankrupt. The vapid output dreamed up, no doubt, by the vacuous legion of first generation media studies graduates is so stunningly awful, unengaging, uninspired and dumbed down that I am surprised the whole country isn’t on Prozac. Or perhaps it is and I didn’t notice. Prozac just might make ‘Deal Or No Deal’ bearable.

I recall, a long time ago, reading that the average household owns just 11 books. At the time we owned around a couple of thousand which equated to a large village full of houses where no books would be found at all to maintain the balance. Our single television suggests that the guy down the road must have at least 8.

I am beginning to think there is no hope.

Like everyone I am, in great part, a product of my time and in my case that’s late 1950’s innocence and austerity through the 60’s loosening of mores, morals, trouser bottoms and regular visits to the barbers. Whilst much of the 1960’s still resonates the 50’s do not really get a look in and pre-50’s is consigned to the history books.

My young world was filled by The Eagle and Boys’ Own. It was all Dan Dare and Roy of the Rovers. The bookshelf was filled with Just William and Jennings and yes – I’ll admit it – Biggles. Laugh all you want, I was an avid fan of Biggles and his adventures with Ginger and Algy and there were, of course, a huge number of books to read. He may not have been a literary genius but Captain W.E. Johns was nothing short of prolific. He made Barbara Cartland look like an amateur by comparison and rumour had it she could knock off one of her titles in an afternoon!

Rolling forward to 2007, Biggles is really the sort, along with characters like Billy Bunter, that I never expected to hear from again. If nothing else, the stories will break every politically correct rule ever conceived. They are filled with racial stereotypes, the class system, the old establishment and a complete lexicon of stiff upper English expressions which died with the wholesale importing of trashy American television.

But I was wrong. Browsing through my local Waterstones yesterday there it was. A Biggles anthology of four of five books in one big tome. Pride of place it had on one of the tables. So… I say old boy, Biggles flies again!

So – what DO Oxford, Cambridge and Dover have in common? Well, according to Chris Kuzneski, they are the sites of England’s finest and oldest universities. This is something I have to admit that I didn’t know. In fact, it took me quite seriously by surprise.

I am a pretty voracious reader and I get through a lot of novels. When I buy books I try and always include an author new to me which can end up being a good or bad experience. But it is seldom as dire as Chris Kuzneski’s ‘The Sign of the Cross’. When an author states that he has performed extensive research I am happy to believe him. When a novel has been published by Penguin who, at least in the distant days when I was working in publishing, have a high standard and a good team of editors then I believe I might be on safe ground. Sadly, Kuzneski’s standard of research leaves an awful lot to be desired and Penguin should be ashamed of themselves for peddling such atrocious garbage.

Rather than perform just a small amount of research and base his English scenes at a Cambridge college, Kuzneski chose instead to conjure one up from his imagination. Dover University, we are informed, was founded in the reign of Elizabeth I and includes magnificent buildings designed by Sir Christopher Wren. These were obviously two names he felt comfortable showing off his knowledge of. What’s more, in recent years the very best of students have been eschewing the big two in favour of Dover.

But it gets worse! The author then shows his complete lack of knowledge of English geography – or perhaps his absurd American view that everywhere in England is ‘just outside of London’ – by having two characters fly – in the morning – from France to London taking the express to Victoria and then boarding the ‘local line into Dover’. Where they arrived… still in the morning! So he didn’t research Network Rail either! And it’s all downhill from this point on with a plot dependent upon rehashed ‘Dan Brown’, more coincidences than a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta, a cliffhanger at the end of every bloody chapter and too many paragraphs starting with the word ‘Anyway’.

I enjoy a good yarn. It would take minimal research to make the English scenes believable but even that would not have saved this book. What on earth Penguin thought they were doing is beyond me. This story didn’t just need more editing – it needed a rejection slip.