OK, OK it’s not the Man Booker but I won a prize today for something I wrote!!!

It all started before Christmas with my purchase of a Hudl. For all those folks outside the UK and, I suspect, many inside the UK, the Hudl is a “cheap as chips” fake (android) iPad, branded with that (she plants her tongue firmly in her cheek) famous electronics brand “Tesco”. Tesco is our leading supermarket brand.

The Hudl is brilliant. It has my calendar on it and it synchs live with all versions so if I add a date on my Hudl, this goes onto my laptop and my internet based calendar so they are all the same. Cool stuff. It also allows me to keep up with my emails and do an occasional bit of internet surfing while I’m at work or Uni without breaking my back by needing to carry my laptop around.

I doubt if I use its full potential – I’ve certainly never made a video on it or taken a photo with it. A few months back, I decided to see if I could bear to read a book on it. Now this is a major-league climb down from me because I am a book person through and through – I have been known to cover my paperbacks with plain white wrappers with “Kindle V -1” on them. You have to admit that’s a bit cantankerous and geeky.

I decided to buy an e-book from Sainsbury’s for two reasons – firstly because it’s a tesco device and I thought it was suitably obnoxious to buy from their competitor and secondly because I had a voucher for lots of Sainsbury’s loyalty points. It almost didn’t matter what the book was. I browsed their website and deliberately picked something I knew I was unlikely to find in a charity shop on paper. OK - it's also true that my choice was based on the fact that it's narrated by a dog!

It was “The art of racing in the rain”. Now I don’t often buy American fiction, not because there isn’t a wonderful body of such but simply because I connect more with European authors. having said that "Snow falling on cedars" is in my top 10 of all time. From the outset, it was a traumatic read because the first page almost reveals the last and it was terribly sad. However, I persevered and found that I liked the e-reader, partly because it was just there rather than carrying something extra and partly because it always fell open on the page where I left it.

Anyway,because I could pull it out and read for a few minutes at a time, I found that it’s the only book for pleasure I’ve finished this year. Last Saturday morning, I read the last 30 pages or so before getting out of bed and I blubbed, blubbed and blubbed some more at its ending. Oh how I loved the book I nearly never bought. When I finished it I got a message from Sainsbury’s saying “please review this book, click here”. I found myself doing just that.

Today I got a sweet email from Sainsbury’s saying that they give a prize each month for the best review of a book that’s posted on their site and that this month I’d won it. Ra ra, go Linda! So you see, I am a prizewinning author…even if it was for a four sentence book review of a book with prose way ahead of anything I could ever write. I almost feel embarrassed to say I won it by reviewing the book, anyway that’s it. I won a book token and I am chuffed to bits for winning it.

LOLA UPDATE: today’s tally 2 x Weetabix, 2 x scrambled egg, 1 x bowl of roast chicken and rice – chicken bought at great expense from the supermarket specially and roasted in our oven until our house stank of cooked meat and was full of smoke from where the juices were spitting onto the hot sides of the oven. Given the house’s normal veggie status (other than pre-prepared dog food), the purchase and cooking of said bird were way above and beyond! Anyway, suffice to say that she seems to be on the mend – fingers crossed.

Thanks to DM for pressing the button on the flash 8x5 times (eight shots of 5x flashes).