A sudden outbreak of epiglottae

Ritual humiliation is the small change of being an author. I can take it on the chin when, as happened last week, the director of a fledgling literary festival near Birmingham, after chasing me for two years to appear at his festival, emailed to say sorry, but since only five people had booked to hear me discuss my latest novel, Secrets of the Sea, he was going to have to cancel Sunday's event.

I can even raise a smile when, on the very same day, the Observer, praising in its TV listings John Malkovich's adaptation of my novel The Dancer Upstairs (poster right), commended the novel/screenplay by 'Nicholas Coleridge'.

But I won't deny that something did stick in my craw as I listened to an item on Radio 4's Feedback on the incorrect use of the word epiglottis in a story that was read out in the Afternoon Readings slot. Following phone-ins from several

medically-minded among her audience, the author, Joan Osbaldeston, admitted to her "slight carelessness" in choosing the word epiglottis instead of uvula.

"Carelessness?" I thought, as the week went on and I met more and more people who had heard her explanation. Here I am, surname appropriated, and I can't even be held responsible for my own mistake. Because, it seemed to me, the epiglottis in question was mine.

In her story Ha Ha Ha, Osbaldeston describes a young woman opening her mouth for a Bulgarian man and saying "Has anyone ever told you that you have a wonderful epiglottis?" The scene bears a spooky resemblance to a central episode in my 2004 novel, Snowleg. There, the encounter takes place in a cafe in Cold War Leipzig. An Englishman meets an East German girl who asks him to look down her throat. "I'm