"Thank you for inviting me. I know how you are with tourists. I appreciate you are not throwing anything at me," says the Englishwoman Sheena Patel as a joke to break the ice. We are at the presentation of her first novel, Soc fan, at La Central de Consell de Cent. The writer really knows how to deliver opening lines, because her novel's is: "I stalk a woman on the internet who is sleeping with the same man as me." Bam. "I'd give anything for a joke," she'll confess later, which is another good streak.