Our meetings take me back to my schooldays for sheer, sit at the back of the class, doodling, please-god-don't-let-anyone-ask-me-a-question torpor, but never more so than today when, in an effort to accommodate the expanding body that is the Pedantic workforce, one of the newly appointed indians rearranged the furniture into rows.
The back of the class, however, is too close to the open window through which, in a spookily uncanny reproduction of my Scottish primary school, an Arctic wind blows in and bites off your face - and so I find myself wedged behind one of the Big Chiefs with an irresistible desire to put chewing gum in his hair, and stick notes on his back. I resist. With difficulty. Ubereditor squeezes himself into what would be the dunce's corner had it not been within thigh pressing distance of Mr T who whilst welcoming us with the words 'all aboard for the bus to hell' is playing the part of headmaster which probably makes UberEd more of a pet and blackboard cleaner than a pest who has to be kept under close surveillance. He's just had a holiday, I mean a business trip, to Australia and has returned from his meetings tanned and chilled in all the ways that are good and none of the ways that are currently London - and so he has a smile spread on his face as smoothly as melted butter on hot bread as he settles himself in his place.
And then we begin.
Three imprints, tens and tens of delicious books. I should be excited - that's what these meetings are all about but instead my heart that plummets like a water balloon from a great height. Each title has an AI from which most of the editors will read verbatim and I've already got to the last book with notes on all those I can't wait to read, before the even first presentation is finished. In exactly this way I skipped ahead and finished Catcher in the Rye while Johnny Glencourse was still sounding out Hol-den Ca-ul-field, ditto the rest of the GCSE syllabus, and still Johnny was stammering over Phow-eeb.
And then I hear a low chuckle.
I glance around. Is somebody off their meds?
A sigh of contentment drifts around the room.' I scan the chairs. People are weeping with fatigue and at least one person may be in a coma, but there seem no signs of the blissful rapture at which the musical crooning seems to hint.
And then it comes again...
'Da da da da.' Followed by a loud shriek of laughter.
Someone thinks that the series about a one-legged co-joined Lesbian twin from Azerbaijan who's working as a forensic scientist on a Lunar zombie penal colony some time in a post apocalyptic future is funny!
Apparently so, though the person in question is six months old and crawling around on the floor with saliva dripping from her mouth.
Who doesn't seem to work here. (Though anything's possible.)
Which may cast some suspicion on her powers of critical analysis.
But no - I spoke too soon. She starts to wail, to be scooped up by her father who cradles her in his arm and, unperturbed, continues his pitch on the difficulties of carrying out an autopsy on a zombie when they're never really dead, especially if you only have one leg and are dragging around your co-joined twin (though the zero gravity of the moon helps...)
Seconds later, baby is swept up by her grandfather and carried off to a distant office where I expect she's working her way through the slush pile.
And we're still only on the third book.
We have been in the room for three years. By the time we get out that baby will be going to college.
