The slush is building up around my desk and I'm swithering about the best way to deal with it. Reject it all now and ensure that the recipients of the standard letter have a miserable Christmas, or wait until January and kick off their new year to a dejected start? I can't bear to do either so I leave them; survivors - for now - of the purge that sweeps the office as old manuscripts burst out of their perished elastic bands like fat men from their belts after eating a good meal, and a ticker tape parade of post it notes flutter around the office before meeting their dark fate inside a hundred oily black plastic bags. I'm wearing my bookbinding apron, usually bristling with paste brushes and hammers and bone folders and scalpels, which I often forget to retract and end up stabbing myself in the guts as I bend, but today there are only scissors as I do the opposite activity and disembowel old proof copies from their utilitarian paper covers, ripping the spines out of them like gutted fish before tossing them with their brothers into garbage sacks.
During a brief moment of inattentiveness when an unsuspecting Chief stepped out of his office for a quiet contemplative smoke on the Marlborough pipe of peace, three of us swooped into his room like Charlie's Angels, with Pledge, Air Freshener and Insect Repellent at the ready, and slowly, slowly began transforming it from a teenage bedroom, complete with stuffed animals, CDs, clothes and teetering ziggaurats of crap into a bastion of literary genius, fortified by towers of orderly manuscripts at various stages of the editing process. I resist the urge to alphabetise them. He's off on holiday next week. That OCD pleasure can wait.
Ah the glamour of working for a publishing house with 'a world-wide reputation for quality, originality and breadth'... especially when that work involves a duster.
I'm going to my literary friend's Christmas drinks' party tonight and I can only imagine the conversations I might have with her other guests who, last year, might as well have been talking to me in clicks for all the sense I made of it. While they talk about their latest scholarly tomes, all I can offer in exchange is a description of my day at the office cleaning out shelves and collecting printer cartridges abandoned on high shelves and stuck down the back of radiators.
...well, unless I mention my finished copies which arrived today, and the staggeringly large order put in by a high-street supermarket that so surprised me I almost had to ring my editor back and check I hadn't misheard.
This is the life of a published author: The book for which you've waited three years and most of your life comes in all its spot-varnished, embossed glory, exactly as it is going to look in the bookshops, a real actual thing, and you look at it and think...
Um.
Now what?
The Indians gather round and whoop and I'm bloody glad I have them to cheer because, in truth, I feel a bit numb as I look at the cover with my name picked out in pink metallic lettering. So much has happened over the past two years, and little of it has been good. At another time I would have gone home and called my husband in from his study and we would have celebrated, but the study is empty, just a bare desk that I have pitifully tried to colonise with all my art materials but can't bring myself to use. The dedication that I wrote before he left, crossed out and reinstated is there on the first page of the book, but he's not. Instead there's a clone of him who walks and talks just like the old husband but seems to have been programmed with stock answers instead of speech, and silence instead of emotions.
And so I can only be grateful that rather than going home to the horrible anticlimax, I'm going to put on my slutty dress and go to a party where I'll know nobody apart from the people serving drinks, my box of brand, spanking new novels stored under the desk with three pairs of shoes and the world's largest ball of twine, 50 light bulbs and a box of padded envelopes - just bits of paper, held together with glue and optimism, and not, after all, the answer to all your prayers.
I sign a copy for Mr T and leave it amongst the other coals on the Newcastle of his desk. He comes in, finds it, exclaims, strides forth from his office holding the book, and as I walk forward for his congratulatory hug there's the sound of sniper fire or anti-aircraft guns (both of which I've actually flinched from in my time) pop pop pop pop pop, exploding at my feet. The sound of dreams, illusions and joyful expectations bursting?
Don't be daft. I'm not that mawkish. It's just the bubble wrap that has fallen out of the box.
Friday, 12 December 2008
Wednesday, 10 December 2008
Wrestled to the floor
At the book group the other week the other women were discussing which plays they had been to recently. It was all National Theatre this and Barbican that, with one of our members, who works in the theatre, cleaning up on the culture quota by having seen every obscure production in the capital. Nel's announcement that she and I were going to the masked Mexican wrestling this weekend went down like Giant Haystack at a ballet recital. She might as well have belched out the theme tune to Hawaii Five-O. There were a few politely bemused murmurs and then the subject quickly turned to Opera.
Nevertheless, there we were clutching our tacos and tequila slammers at the ringside of Lucha Libre at the Roundhouse, within splatter distance of such Mexican legends as Mystico de Juarez and the Blue Demon... Where outside of a gay fetish club are you going to get cross-dressing exoticos in high-cut leotards, or muchos rudos oiled-up muscle men in very short spangly shorts wearing bondage masks that tie up the back of the head, rolling around on the floor together?
Ding-ding-ding.
Back at work one of my projects was postponed until next year together with a nice chunk of my projected income but as I was getting up from the punch, blearily trying to look on the bright side (weekends off - meaning a renewed relationship with Strictly Come Dancing; novel resurrected - meaning I now have to write the damn thing; thirty hours of transcribed taped conversations - meaning that by the time the project kicks off again next year I will have to redo all the work: yippee a real win-win situation all round) there was a small ray of consolation. One of our starriest authors was coming in and, indulgently, I was told I could sit in on the meeting, just to bathe in the reflected glory.
Silver lining? I don't know. I mean looking gormless at a meeting where I have no function might not be everybody's idea of a good time, but pathetic drone that I am, I was really excited.
And then the fateful day arrived. I wore mascara - that's how prepared I was. I cancelled my own appointments in the afternoon and then, since I was staying at work all day, the MD invited me to the Alliance Christmas Party that evening at Faber. All this and heaven too, huh? That mascara wasn't going to waste.
I got back to my important job of organising the office Secret Santa. This had, in fact, been done the previous week while I was off doing my version of Extreme Home Makeover - Party Edition (which basically consists of hiding the mousetraps). Unfortunately the envelope with the unpicked names nestled in its depths had been left on the desk of an unsuspecting member of staff who had then filled it with manuscripts and sent it off to a reader. The reader then opened the envelope sprinkling staff names around her study like confetti and since she didn't plan to buy novelty gifts for the rest of us, we had to repeat the draw.
I was just on my third pick to find someone I could palm off the wind-up nun that someone gave me for my birthday (oh don't you just love the jokey present that costs the same as a perfectly nice box of chocolates) when a Chief came shooting out of his office in his customary Tasmanian Devil rush and announced in the kind of booming voice perfectly honed for public speaking: 'Did I ask you to come to this meeting today?'
Me (uncomfortably aware that Indians all around me had fallen silent and were hurriedly whittling arrows out of pencils): 'Yes...'
'Why?' he bellowed.
It was a good question, and one I had also asked myself but, being unwilling to look a gift meeting in the mouth, had left unanswered. 'Erm, I think you were just being nice?' I stammered uncomfortably (well so much for that idea.)
'Well, look don't come, because...' and he gave a perfectly good and plausible reason that I didn't properly hear because by then I was back on the floor, out for the count - crushed.
It occurs to me that office life isn't actually so different from wrestling. There you are standing in the middle of the ring when a man leaps on you from above and flattens you in front of an audience - except that in the office none of the men wear sequins on their pants.
Ouch!
Guess who's getting the wind up nun from their Secret Santa this year.....
Nevertheless, there we were clutching our tacos and tequila slammers at the ringside of Lucha Libre at the Roundhouse, within splatter distance of such Mexican legends as Mystico de Juarez and the Blue Demon... Where outside of a gay fetish club are you going to get cross-dressing exoticos in high-cut leotards, or muchos rudos oiled-up muscle men in very short spangly shorts wearing bondage masks that tie up the back of the head, rolling around on the floor together?
Ding-ding-ding.
Back at work one of my projects was postponed until next year together with a nice chunk of my projected income but as I was getting up from the punch, blearily trying to look on the bright side (weekends off - meaning a renewed relationship with Strictly Come Dancing; novel resurrected - meaning I now have to write the damn thing; thirty hours of transcribed taped conversations - meaning that by the time the project kicks off again next year I will have to redo all the work: yippee a real win-win situation all round) there was a small ray of consolation. One of our starriest authors was coming in and, indulgently, I was told I could sit in on the meeting, just to bathe in the reflected glory.
Silver lining? I don't know. I mean looking gormless at a meeting where I have no function might not be everybody's idea of a good time, but pathetic drone that I am, I was really excited.
And then the fateful day arrived. I wore mascara - that's how prepared I was. I cancelled my own appointments in the afternoon and then, since I was staying at work all day, the MD invited me to the Alliance Christmas Party that evening at Faber. All this and heaven too, huh? That mascara wasn't going to waste.
I got back to my important job of organising the office Secret Santa. This had, in fact, been done the previous week while I was off doing my version of Extreme Home Makeover - Party Edition (which basically consists of hiding the mousetraps). Unfortunately the envelope with the unpicked names nestled in its depths had been left on the desk of an unsuspecting member of staff who had then filled it with manuscripts and sent it off to a reader. The reader then opened the envelope sprinkling staff names around her study like confetti and since she didn't plan to buy novelty gifts for the rest of us, we had to repeat the draw.
I was just on my third pick to find someone I could palm off the wind-up nun that someone gave me for my birthday (oh don't you just love the jokey present that costs the same as a perfectly nice box of chocolates) when a Chief came shooting out of his office in his customary Tasmanian Devil rush and announced in the kind of booming voice perfectly honed for public speaking: 'Did I ask you to come to this meeting today?'
Me (uncomfortably aware that Indians all around me had fallen silent and were hurriedly whittling arrows out of pencils): 'Yes...'
'Why?' he bellowed.
It was a good question, and one I had also asked myself but, being unwilling to look a gift meeting in the mouth, had left unanswered. 'Erm, I think you were just being nice?' I stammered uncomfortably (well so much for that idea.)
'Well, look don't come, because...' and he gave a perfectly good and plausible reason that I didn't properly hear because by then I was back on the floor, out for the count - crushed.
It occurs to me that office life isn't actually so different from wrestling. There you are standing in the middle of the ring when a man leaps on you from above and flattens you in front of an audience - except that in the office none of the men wear sequins on their pants.
Ouch!
Guess who's getting the wind up nun from their Secret Santa this year.....
Tuesday, 9 December 2008
Let your hair down
My mother didn't believe in parties.
She didn't believe in long hair, mess, fuss, waste, hire-purchase, mail-order catalogues, clothing that showed dirt or praise either. However, since her hair-brushing techniques could have been applied as torture methods for the Vietcong, Rapunzel-like tresses were never going to be an option in our house, and all other prohibited activities were mere unattainable dreams - so the only sanction that really had much of an impact on my life was her distaste for anything vaguely celebratory.
I spent my youth being the only person in sensible clothes at birthday parties surrounded with girls dressed in pastel frocks with net skirts (waste and mail-order catalogues) wearing their waist-length ringlets (fuss) tied up in pink satin bows (dirt-attracting). Their kitchens would be transformed into party grottos with the help of a paper tablecloth (waste) draped over a wallpapering table, and festooned with paper plates (even more waste), streamers, paper chains and concertina fans (craven, teeth-sucking waste) and plastic cups (waste that could nevertheless be thriftily washed and used again. And again. We had plastic cups that were almost heirlooms.) The table in turn would be laden with fairy cakes (fuss), caramel cakes (made with condensed milk boiled in the can, mess and fuss) and tiny little sandwiches with the crusts cut off (fuss, waste and mess).
On my own birthday parties were verboten. Parties meant mess. No decorations in casa Calvin - because sellotape might damage the walls and pins left holes in the plaster and gifts would have to be useful. Who can forget the gift of time in the alarm clock year of 1972? Or the duvet of 1975? The excitement of the pile of socks, underwear and books, that I had usually found months earlier hidden under the bed and already read, waiting unwrapped on the sofa (to avoid waste of gift-wrap) was hard to contain, as you can imagine. And later - the birthday tea consisting of a dumpling with a lucky silver sixpence inserted into its depths which was removed and carefully washed to be reused the next year (though I never figured out was supposed to be so bloody lucky about it, except that you didn't choke on it). I didn't even like dumpling, but nevertheless it had to be eaten (waste).
I'll stop now before I get overly sentimental about the hardships of a Scottish Presbyterian childhood and the joys of lukewarm dumpling, flecked with raisings like clammy flesh wtih a skin disease and skip forward several decades to now.
Unlike my mother, I like fuss, can't get enough of it. I positively adore waste. My whole personal economy is built on credit and mail-order catalogues (albeit of the on-line shopping variety) and though I still struggle with the concept of praise and can only tolerate mess when I'm the person who has made it, parties are something I really, really love. Well, at least until thirty minutes before all the guests arrive and I'm standing in my newly cleaned house setting out all the plastic glasses and paper plates, wondering what the * I was thinking of when I decided to invite 50 of my closest never-see-them-from-one-year-to-the-other acquaintances to eat fiddly, fussy food that I have spent the previous two days slaving over.
It's strange how it suddenly seems like an absolutely terrible idea just when it's too late to disinvite everyone.
And that's how you find me last Friday night, hurriedly piling 48 cup cakes with icing that will not set onto a three tiered cake stand that drips white sticky guano all over the floor while the microwave pings, and the barbecue smoulders (my son decided to light it two hours before people were due to arrive and it has now gone out again because - yes - you've guessed it, it is also POURING with rain), just as a friend who was supposed to be helping calls from the car to say she's running late and can I put the oven on and assemble three baking trays for her (this is helping?). Then the lighter burns my fingers as I singe of most of my eyebrows trying to light the candles, and I worry alternately that I don't have enough food and then that I have too much, and can't remember who, if anyone I've invited.
Remind me, why does a deprived childhood mean that you have to massively overcompensate for the rest of your life and waaaay beyond the time that having birthdays is appropriate?
My fellow Indians are the first to arrive, em masse, sodden, bedraggled, tired after the long schlep to the postal district beyond the furthest reaches of civilization, clutching a bottle and many packets of cigarettes. The smokers look around them anxiously wondering how quickly they can excuse themselves to disappear outside under the garden umbrella and light up. Disconcertingly the others all sit down in the kitchen as though expecting an entertainer. After fifteen minutes of spectacular fussing with plates of food and cups and bottle openers I realise that this would be me. What? I have to talk to them? Isn't it enough that I ply them with drinks? Isn't that my husband's job? Why the hell does he have to be having a philandering mid-life crisis now, when he could be much more usefully passing round wine?
I try to enlist one of my sons while the other is in the garden, unsuccesfully, making fire since the charcoal is now damp. 'Offer people drinks!' I hiss, but his response is to look at me as if I had suggested he might like to give me one of his kidneys. Let's just hope I never need a transplant. The youngest daughter whose chore this was supposed to be has brought in a friend for reinforcements but they have decided they need to be in full make up and wearing as little as possible before this task can be properly undertaken, and resultingly, are in their bedroom, in the dark, smoking cigarettes out of the window, deciding what not to wear. Office smokers are standing outside in the rain. I pray none of them offer advice to fire-starter who is liable to walk off in a strop if criticised. Instead I think I hear one of our merry band of Indians incite him, not to the use of dry kindling, but to insurrection, suggesting that - poor thing - he shouldn't need to be there, bent double over a hot stove, when others were swilling beer, having a nice time, and being sympathetic. Smoke is coming out of my ears now. Don't ruddy sympathise with him, he didn't get up until noon. He has been slaying Orks for most of the last year. Let him bring home the bacon sandwiches, please, just for a change.
Another half an hour passes. Graham Rawle arrives and... em, that's about it. It's almost eight o'clock and nobody else has come. I fear the Indians think I have no friends and that they have been invited along as rent a crowd. This is true, but I hoped it would be slightly less obvious.
I'm smiling with a glass in each hand which are both for me and running through the guest list in my head. Who did I invite? Did I, in fact, invite anyone? Are they going to turn up at all? How can friends you don't have and haven't invited pitch up to a party they don't know about. My mind is a blank of humiliating over-catering. How stupid am I going to look when I'm left with fifty hand made spinach fatayer, fifty bacon rolls,sixty falafel, three dips, polenta and a hundred cheesy circles? What shall I do with all the poignantly unused plastic wine glasses sitting waiting for the ghostly guests who don't come? I let the smokers light up inside just to make the place look full and then try to encourage them to go into the other room which looks like the Marie Celeste with candles which flicker eerily in the draught like something out of a Vincent Price movie.
And then the doorbell rings.
Relief.
People.
Real live breathing eating drinking smiling kissing people who remember my name and have indeed been invited. Loads of them. Lovely, lovely, friends from as far away as Finsbury Park. A couple of publishers, an agent, a few spare men, many, many women under thirty, a banker, an academic, a museum curator, a smattering of artists and a lot of Pedants.
Only two people failed to turn up and you know who you are...
The last couple left at two am. I rewashed all the plastic glasses in the dishwasher (frugality and waste), threw away all the paper plates (pure waste) and ate what little food remained so as to avoid waste (finally my mother is smiling at me from heaven), cleaned up the empty bottles (see ma, no mess - ah, she's straightening the antimaccasers up there in the great OCD mansion in the sky, brimming with approval though, naturally, stopping short of actually praise...) and went to bed.
I woke the next morning, ever so slightly fatigued, staggered to the bathroom for a glass of water, regarded myself in the mirror, another year older and deeper in debt, and recoiled like I had been hit from behind by a speeding reality check car... Despite the many tenners and hours I had spent at the hairdressers the day before having my tresses straightened out whilst listening to a S'th 'frican girl tell me about the healing power of crystals and the pyramid she has erected in her flat to protect her from microwave rays, it occurs to me that though my mother was absolutely wrong about fuss, dirt, credit, waste and parties...
I'll give her the long-hair.
She didn't believe in long hair, mess, fuss, waste, hire-purchase, mail-order catalogues, clothing that showed dirt or praise either. However, since her hair-brushing techniques could have been applied as torture methods for the Vietcong, Rapunzel-like tresses were never going to be an option in our house, and all other prohibited activities were mere unattainable dreams - so the only sanction that really had much of an impact on my life was her distaste for anything vaguely celebratory.
I spent my youth being the only person in sensible clothes at birthday parties surrounded with girls dressed in pastel frocks with net skirts (waste and mail-order catalogues) wearing their waist-length ringlets (fuss) tied up in pink satin bows (dirt-attracting). Their kitchens would be transformed into party grottos with the help of a paper tablecloth (waste) draped over a wallpapering table, and festooned with paper plates (even more waste), streamers, paper chains and concertina fans (craven, teeth-sucking waste) and plastic cups (waste that could nevertheless be thriftily washed and used again. And again. We had plastic cups that were almost heirlooms.) The table in turn would be laden with fairy cakes (fuss), caramel cakes (made with condensed milk boiled in the can, mess and fuss) and tiny little sandwiches with the crusts cut off (fuss, waste and mess).
On my own birthday parties were verboten. Parties meant mess. No decorations in casa Calvin - because sellotape might damage the walls and pins left holes in the plaster and gifts would have to be useful. Who can forget the gift of time in the alarm clock year of 1972? Or the duvet of 1975? The excitement of the pile of socks, underwear and books, that I had usually found months earlier hidden under the bed and already read, waiting unwrapped on the sofa (to avoid waste of gift-wrap) was hard to contain, as you can imagine. And later - the birthday tea consisting of a dumpling with a lucky silver sixpence inserted into its depths which was removed and carefully washed to be reused the next year (though I never figured out was supposed to be so bloody lucky about it, except that you didn't choke on it). I didn't even like dumpling, but nevertheless it had to be eaten (waste).
I'll stop now before I get overly sentimental about the hardships of a Scottish Presbyterian childhood and the joys of lukewarm dumpling, flecked with raisings like clammy flesh wtih a skin disease and skip forward several decades to now.
Unlike my mother, I like fuss, can't get enough of it. I positively adore waste. My whole personal economy is built on credit and mail-order catalogues (albeit of the on-line shopping variety) and though I still struggle with the concept of praise and can only tolerate mess when I'm the person who has made it, parties are something I really, really love. Well, at least until thirty minutes before all the guests arrive and I'm standing in my newly cleaned house setting out all the plastic glasses and paper plates, wondering what the * I was thinking of when I decided to invite 50 of my closest never-see-them-from-one-year-to-the-other acquaintances to eat fiddly, fussy food that I have spent the previous two days slaving over.
It's strange how it suddenly seems like an absolutely terrible idea just when it's too late to disinvite everyone.
And that's how you find me last Friday night, hurriedly piling 48 cup cakes with icing that will not set onto a three tiered cake stand that drips white sticky guano all over the floor while the microwave pings, and the barbecue smoulders (my son decided to light it two hours before people were due to arrive and it has now gone out again because - yes - you've guessed it, it is also POURING with rain), just as a friend who was supposed to be helping calls from the car to say she's running late and can I put the oven on and assemble three baking trays for her (this is helping?). Then the lighter burns my fingers as I singe of most of my eyebrows trying to light the candles, and I worry alternately that I don't have enough food and then that I have too much, and can't remember who, if anyone I've invited.
Remind me, why does a deprived childhood mean that you have to massively overcompensate for the rest of your life and waaaay beyond the time that having birthdays is appropriate?
My fellow Indians are the first to arrive, em masse, sodden, bedraggled, tired after the long schlep to the postal district beyond the furthest reaches of civilization, clutching a bottle and many packets of cigarettes. The smokers look around them anxiously wondering how quickly they can excuse themselves to disappear outside under the garden umbrella and light up. Disconcertingly the others all sit down in the kitchen as though expecting an entertainer. After fifteen minutes of spectacular fussing with plates of food and cups and bottle openers I realise that this would be me. What? I have to talk to them? Isn't it enough that I ply them with drinks? Isn't that my husband's job? Why the hell does he have to be having a philandering mid-life crisis now, when he could be much more usefully passing round wine?
I try to enlist one of my sons while the other is in the garden, unsuccesfully, making fire since the charcoal is now damp. 'Offer people drinks!' I hiss, but his response is to look at me as if I had suggested he might like to give me one of his kidneys. Let's just hope I never need a transplant. The youngest daughter whose chore this was supposed to be has brought in a friend for reinforcements but they have decided they need to be in full make up and wearing as little as possible before this task can be properly undertaken, and resultingly, are in their bedroom, in the dark, smoking cigarettes out of the window, deciding what not to wear. Office smokers are standing outside in the rain. I pray none of them offer advice to fire-starter who is liable to walk off in a strop if criticised. Instead I think I hear one of our merry band of Indians incite him, not to the use of dry kindling, but to insurrection, suggesting that - poor thing - he shouldn't need to be there, bent double over a hot stove, when others were swilling beer, having a nice time, and being sympathetic. Smoke is coming out of my ears now. Don't ruddy sympathise with him, he didn't get up until noon. He has been slaying Orks for most of the last year. Let him bring home the bacon sandwiches, please, just for a change.
Another half an hour passes. Graham Rawle arrives and... em, that's about it. It's almost eight o'clock and nobody else has come. I fear the Indians think I have no friends and that they have been invited along as rent a crowd. This is true, but I hoped it would be slightly less obvious.
I'm smiling with a glass in each hand which are both for me and running through the guest list in my head. Who did I invite? Did I, in fact, invite anyone? Are they going to turn up at all? How can friends you don't have and haven't invited pitch up to a party they don't know about. My mind is a blank of humiliating over-catering. How stupid am I going to look when I'm left with fifty hand made spinach fatayer, fifty bacon rolls,sixty falafel, three dips, polenta and a hundred cheesy circles? What shall I do with all the poignantly unused plastic wine glasses sitting waiting for the ghostly guests who don't come? I let the smokers light up inside just to make the place look full and then try to encourage them to go into the other room which looks like the Marie Celeste with candles which flicker eerily in the draught like something out of a Vincent Price movie.
And then the doorbell rings.
Relief.
People.
Real live breathing eating drinking smiling kissing people who remember my name and have indeed been invited. Loads of them. Lovely, lovely, friends from as far away as Finsbury Park. A couple of publishers, an agent, a few spare men, many, many women under thirty, a banker, an academic, a museum curator, a smattering of artists and a lot of Pedants.
Only two people failed to turn up and you know who you are...
The last couple left at two am. I rewashed all the plastic glasses in the dishwasher (frugality and waste), threw away all the paper plates (pure waste) and ate what little food remained so as to avoid waste (finally my mother is smiling at me from heaven), cleaned up the empty bottles (see ma, no mess - ah, she's straightening the antimaccasers up there in the great OCD mansion in the sky, brimming with approval though, naturally, stopping short of actually praise...) and went to bed.
I woke the next morning, ever so slightly fatigued, staggered to the bathroom for a glass of water, regarded myself in the mirror, another year older and deeper in debt, and recoiled like I had been hit from behind by a speeding reality check car... Despite the many tenners and hours I had spent at the hairdressers the day before having my tresses straightened out whilst listening to a S'th 'frican girl tell me about the healing power of crystals and the pyramid she has erected in her flat to protect her from microwave rays, it occurs to me that though my mother was absolutely wrong about fuss, dirt, credit, waste and parties...
I'll give her the long-hair.
Wednesday, 3 December 2008
Cake walk
As I mentioned in a previous post, the last time the West London Ladies who Lurch met we read Obama's Dreams of my Father.
Well, round about then Eva was working in her smart gallery one day when the Big Canon who publishes it came in and somehow or another the subject of books came up.
I imagine it went something like this:
'He's seems like a very nice man, that Obama.' (Eva)
'Yup, we're really cleaning up with his books...' (the Big Canon)
He bought jewelery, apparently. I hope that wasn't supposed to be a surprise...
Anyway, as the conversation turned from politerature to reading groups, the Big Canon promised to send her some books which we could read. Oh did he now, I thought doing my inner, head waving, finger snapping, girlfriend thing when she announced this over the designer grass at the last meting. What's so great about their books - I've been offering them Nancy Huston's Fault Lines for months and there have been no takers, just the usual suggestion that we all reread Jane Sodding Austin. You can't have another publisher wading into your own book club bearing rival best-sellers, Independent Alliance or no ruddy Alliance... Luckily the promise has not yet been fulfilled.
So in the absence of free Canon fodder, I jumped in with a suggestion. I wanted something toast-ish, but very literary toast, the sort of reliable plot-driven, alternative existence kind of book that swallows up two days of your life and makes you feel like you've lost a friend when you turn the last page.
Some of us had raved about Siri Hustvedt's What I Loved (which I read when I had flu during a family holiday in the Athen's Hilton - never even looked out the window at the Acropolis, just curled up in bed with New York for a day longer than was absolutely necessary), so I chose The Sorrows of an American. Fran was not convinced: 'Has anyone read the reviews? Let's have a back up in case it's no good.'
I was mightily offended. No good and Siri do not belong in the same sentence. However, once I had the book I carried it around with me for weeks with all the other things I should have been reading, feeling tired and dispirited every time I looked at it nestling amongst the manuscripts. The book bag is the equivalent of the gym membership - you think that simply having it is sufficient effort - goodness knows you shouldn't have to actually use it. And then I was on my way home from work and the bus broke down, so out came Sorrows and by the time I turned the first page I was gone, living in Brooklyn, with a psychoanalytic practice and a lodger - ah the lodger/landlord plot - what would we do without it? How else would opposites collide? Of course, a few pages further on I was slightly disconcerted to discover I was a man, and then, on the heels of that realisation, just as I was happily settled in to my new life, much perturbed to find myself lusting after another woman. On one page you're looking round your apartment at the furniture feeling comfortably tweedy and bookish and then, hey wait a minute, hold on there, no, no, NO, I don't do breasts...
Too late to go back though, I was already hooked on the dead Norwegian father who conveniently never threw anything away and has left behind a secret and a room full of papers and letters behind so that it can be unearthed, unlike my own father whose only paper trail was a tiny diary in which he recorded the weather and had said, on his last visit to my house for lunch, that 'Marion looked very nice today.' There's a story in that too, but no hidden skeletons. No our skeletons are all out on stands for everyone to label.
I was late for the reading group discussion as I had been to an networking event at a woman's magazine in South London (several freelancers with a case of wine and several bowls of chips with mayonaisse, each of us saying 'I never usually come to these sort of things but I need the work..: I never usually eat chips but these are delicious.... I 'm not really drinking at the moment but yes, why not...) I had done the sensible thing and printed out a map, and then done the stupid thing and forgotten my glasses, so I had been wandering around the Tate Modern looking for the restaurant holding a piece of paper in my hands, thrusting it under the nose of strangers asking them if they could read. Surprisingly nobody punched me.
So, much delayed as a result of my little game of blind woman's bluff, by the time I arrived at the house of the host, the women had already dissed and dismissed the novel and were eating cupcakes, rapturously.
None of them liked my choice.
'Who recommended that awful book anyway,' asked Eva as Fran looked smug.
'Erm it was me,' I said with a mouth full of cake as Siri and I went home with our tales between our legs.
I have them reading Fieldwork next time which they had better like or my credibility is blown. If this book doesn't save me, I fear the Canons might be in a with a chance. Maybe all booksellers should forget the belly bands and the metallic lettering and just cover their books with cream cheese icing.
Some people have no ruddy taste.
Well, round about then Eva was working in her smart gallery one day when the Big Canon who publishes it came in and somehow or another the subject of books came up.
I imagine it went something like this:
'He's seems like a very nice man, that Obama.' (Eva)
'Yup, we're really cleaning up with his books...' (the Big Canon)
He bought jewelery, apparently. I hope that wasn't supposed to be a surprise...
Anyway, as the conversation turned from politerature to reading groups, the Big Canon promised to send her some books which we could read. Oh did he now, I thought doing my inner, head waving, finger snapping, girlfriend thing when she announced this over the designer grass at the last meting. What's so great about their books - I've been offering them Nancy Huston's Fault Lines for months and there have been no takers, just the usual suggestion that we all reread Jane Sodding Austin. You can't have another publisher wading into your own book club bearing rival best-sellers, Independent Alliance or no ruddy Alliance... Luckily the promise has not yet been fulfilled.
So in the absence of free Canon fodder, I jumped in with a suggestion. I wanted something toast-ish, but very literary toast, the sort of reliable plot-driven, alternative existence kind of book that swallows up two days of your life and makes you feel like you've lost a friend when you turn the last page.
Some of us had raved about Siri Hustvedt's What I Loved (which I read when I had flu during a family holiday in the Athen's Hilton - never even looked out the window at the Acropolis, just curled up in bed with New York for a day longer than was absolutely necessary), so I chose The Sorrows of an American. Fran was not convinced: 'Has anyone read the reviews? Let's have a back up in case it's no good.'
I was mightily offended. No good and Siri do not belong in the same sentence. However, once I had the book I carried it around with me for weeks with all the other things I should have been reading, feeling tired and dispirited every time I looked at it nestling amongst the manuscripts. The book bag is the equivalent of the gym membership - you think that simply having it is sufficient effort - goodness knows you shouldn't have to actually use it. And then I was on my way home from work and the bus broke down, so out came Sorrows and by the time I turned the first page I was gone, living in Brooklyn, with a psychoanalytic practice and a lodger - ah the lodger/landlord plot - what would we do without it? How else would opposites collide? Of course, a few pages further on I was slightly disconcerted to discover I was a man, and then, on the heels of that realisation, just as I was happily settled in to my new life, much perturbed to find myself lusting after another woman. On one page you're looking round your apartment at the furniture feeling comfortably tweedy and bookish and then, hey wait a minute, hold on there, no, no, NO, I don't do breasts...
Too late to go back though, I was already hooked on the dead Norwegian father who conveniently never threw anything away and has left behind a secret and a room full of papers and letters behind so that it can be unearthed, unlike my own father whose only paper trail was a tiny diary in which he recorded the weather and had said, on his last visit to my house for lunch, that 'Marion looked very nice today.' There's a story in that too, but no hidden skeletons. No our skeletons are all out on stands for everyone to label.
I was late for the reading group discussion as I had been to an networking event at a woman's magazine in South London (several freelancers with a case of wine and several bowls of chips with mayonaisse, each of us saying 'I never usually come to these sort of things but I need the work..: I never usually eat chips but these are delicious.... I 'm not really drinking at the moment but yes, why not...) I had done the sensible thing and printed out a map, and then done the stupid thing and forgotten my glasses, so I had been wandering around the Tate Modern looking for the restaurant holding a piece of paper in my hands, thrusting it under the nose of strangers asking them if they could read. Surprisingly nobody punched me.
So, much delayed as a result of my little game of blind woman's bluff, by the time I arrived at the house of the host, the women had already dissed and dismissed the novel and were eating cupcakes, rapturously.
None of them liked my choice.
'Who recommended that awful book anyway,' asked Eva as Fran looked smug.
'Erm it was me,' I said with a mouth full of cake as Siri and I went home with our tales between our legs.
I have them reading Fieldwork next time which they had better like or my credibility is blown. If this book doesn't save me, I fear the Canons might be in a with a chance. Maybe all booksellers should forget the belly bands and the metallic lettering and just cover their books with cream cheese icing.
Some people have no ruddy taste.
Monday, 1 December 2008
Better than sliced bread
When I used to eat for a living my favourite food was toast.
I would come home from one of those bastions of Michelin-starred all-male dining like Orrery or Lindsay house, having eaten everything from the canapes to the petit fours, and at 1:00am find myself sitting alone in the kitchen while the rest of the house slept, eating Mother's Pride.
Of course, it had nothing to do with hunger and a lot to do with alcohol. But though the meal I had was often, though not always, delicious (I reviewed an awful lot of stinkers who have since gone in to the great waste disposal of life), the food was all so rarefied and pretty - not to mention pretty small portioned. It was all little tastes of this and morsels of that; the teeny, tiny amuse bouche, invariably in a shot glass filled with a foam or cappuccino, or sometimes even spume (never have people paid so much money for so much whipped air), followed by the main course with vegetables as a garnish, pre-dessert and proper dessert and then the extra courses that the chef would sometimes send out in between. It was an embarrassment of rich food but still, at the end of the evening, all I really wanted was a reassuringly un-complex carbohydrate - sliced bread with Lurpak, salty and sweet, the butter melting into puddles and dripping on to the plate - familiar and honest and real.
Sometimes I think that quality publishing isn't so different from dining out in fine restaurants. It's easy to get spoiled by a diet fat on words and heavy on plot where every day is another long, long Tasting Menu with a matched wine for each course until you're drunk on books and can't tell any more what you're reading. It's hardly surprising that publishers and agents say they give up if a manuscript doesn't interest them after only a few pages. Everybody wants something that wakes them out of the drunken stupor.
And I guess we all have our own version of toast..
One of the Indians in the office was saying that she didn't think that there were many women who didn't secretly enjoy a Marian Keyes on the beach, but that doesn't tick the toast box for me. Nor does Jane genius but dreary Austin (I know, I know, but I'm not made like other women), For comfort reading I want crime - somebody on a slab after a grizzly murder, a mystery, some tension, or a stalker with a telephoto lens. When I was younger I admit, albeit reluctantly, that before being married to an academic shamed me out of them, I was a fan of the 80s bonkbuster. A long-ago sad weekend in Paris was only bearable because of a tattered paperback I found in the hotel by Jilly Cooper, whose books I had previously disdained - but sometimes you cling to stereotypes and girls called Fanella like a lifeline, or a pair of reigns and a riding crop in this case.
When not gorging on airport murders, what I usually want from a book is a parallel life that sucks me in and lets me be someone else for a while; not the woman stuck in a traffic jam on Ladbroke Grove but a teenage hooker in Vegas, an anthropologist in Thailand, a Ukrainian immigrant in Canada in the 1950s, or a murderous taxi driver. It's a chance to act without learning lines. A way to travel without leaving your head. A vicarious experience in a room where all the doors may be locked.
White Tiger was the first book I read when I started working here and that's certainly not toast. There's nothing cosy about Aravind's story. It grabs you by the throat and doesn't let you go until the last page. We've recently bought another two, very different, but equally arresting books: the first, Cooking Dirty about the restaurant business, is gritty, laconic and Raymond-Carving knife-sharp, while the second , a novel called Thief has completely split our mostly female office - Indians and Chiefs alike. It's a very explicit and coolly self-possessed story of a woman which touches on some pretty taboo subjects and who some of us identified with, fairly uncomfortably, while others recoiled and wouldn't as much as sit down on her vacated bar stool. I was firmly in the first category and loved it. It's not unctuous sauces and creamy mash with truffle oil - it's wasabi and a vodka martini at Duke's Hotel Bar followed by the Heimlich Manoeuvre - something that stops you getting jaded and longing for a slice of toast....
Though have two of those martinis and all bets are off, and after three you can't focus your eyes anyway.
I would come home from one of those bastions of Michelin-starred all-male dining like Orrery or Lindsay house, having eaten everything from the canapes to the petit fours, and at 1:00am find myself sitting alone in the kitchen while the rest of the house slept, eating Mother's Pride.
Of course, it had nothing to do with hunger and a lot to do with alcohol. But though the meal I had was often, though not always, delicious (I reviewed an awful lot of stinkers who have since gone in to the great waste disposal of life), the food was all so rarefied and pretty - not to mention pretty small portioned. It was all little tastes of this and morsels of that; the teeny, tiny amuse bouche, invariably in a shot glass filled with a foam or cappuccino, or sometimes even spume (never have people paid so much money for so much whipped air), followed by the main course with vegetables as a garnish, pre-dessert and proper dessert and then the extra courses that the chef would sometimes send out in between. It was an embarrassment of rich food but still, at the end of the evening, all I really wanted was a reassuringly un-complex carbohydrate - sliced bread with Lurpak, salty and sweet, the butter melting into puddles and dripping on to the plate - familiar and honest and real.
Sometimes I think that quality publishing isn't so different from dining out in fine restaurants. It's easy to get spoiled by a diet fat on words and heavy on plot where every day is another long, long Tasting Menu with a matched wine for each course until you're drunk on books and can't tell any more what you're reading. It's hardly surprising that publishers and agents say they give up if a manuscript doesn't interest them after only a few pages. Everybody wants something that wakes them out of the drunken stupor.
And I guess we all have our own version of toast..
One of the Indians in the office was saying that she didn't think that there were many women who didn't secretly enjoy a Marian Keyes on the beach, but that doesn't tick the toast box for me. Nor does Jane genius but dreary Austin (I know, I know, but I'm not made like other women), For comfort reading I want crime - somebody on a slab after a grizzly murder, a mystery, some tension, or a stalker with a telephoto lens. When I was younger I admit, albeit reluctantly, that before being married to an academic shamed me out of them, I was a fan of the 80s bonkbuster. A long-ago sad weekend in Paris was only bearable because of a tattered paperback I found in the hotel by Jilly Cooper, whose books I had previously disdained - but sometimes you cling to stereotypes and girls called Fanella like a lifeline, or a pair of reigns and a riding crop in this case.
When not gorging on airport murders, what I usually want from a book is a parallel life that sucks me in and lets me be someone else for a while; not the woman stuck in a traffic jam on Ladbroke Grove but a teenage hooker in Vegas, an anthropologist in Thailand, a Ukrainian immigrant in Canada in the 1950s, or a murderous taxi driver. It's a chance to act without learning lines. A way to travel without leaving your head. A vicarious experience in a room where all the doors may be locked.
White Tiger was the first book I read when I started working here and that's certainly not toast. There's nothing cosy about Aravind's story. It grabs you by the throat and doesn't let you go until the last page. We've recently bought another two, very different, but equally arresting books: the first, Cooking Dirty about the restaurant business, is gritty, laconic and Raymond-Carving knife-sharp, while the second , a novel called Thief has completely split our mostly female office - Indians and Chiefs alike. It's a very explicit and coolly self-possessed story of a woman which touches on some pretty taboo subjects and who some of us identified with, fairly uncomfortably, while others recoiled and wouldn't as much as sit down on her vacated bar stool. I was firmly in the first category and loved it. It's not unctuous sauces and creamy mash with truffle oil - it's wasabi and a vodka martini at Duke's Hotel Bar followed by the Heimlich Manoeuvre - something that stops you getting jaded and longing for a slice of toast....
Though have two of those martinis and all bets are off, and after three you can't focus your eyes anyway.
Thursday, 27 November 2008
Shelved
We were three times losers in the PEN quiz, but came a very commendable 18th, so Pedantic Heads were held high and company pride maintained.
I went to a quiz somewhat lower down the scale. To the BBC to see a taping of Never Mind the Buzzcocks, to watch my friend Phill hum intros, none of which I could guess. I'm so unplugged I didn't even know who the other guests were except for one poor simple guy from a boy band, taunted so mercilessly by Simon Amstell, that I wanted to get up out if the audience and smack him. It was so cringingly painful, like the slow boy at school being picked on by the class clever dick. Even the person sitting next to me had his head in his hands, unable to watch.
And why do people think that standing in a line up being ridiculed is a great way to rejuvenate a fading career? The real show takes about three hours to film and the one hit wonders of yesteryear are standing out there under the lights for as long as twenty minutes trying to look impassive while the panelists make derisory remarks about them, just to take a three second bow. If that's funny then I've lost my sense of humour. It's like Bedlam with video clips.
I didn't really want to go to the Green Room afterwards, though the likes of Matthew Wright, apparently the host of a daytime chat show watched by the unemployed, and comedienne Katy Brand, are, as I'm sure you agree, hard to resist.
And yet, somehow I managed.
Phill looked tired. I was exhausted. We passed Paxo in the hall on the way out who also looked knackered. The two greeted each other with the same cordial familiarity I show the man from Viking Office Supplies - believe me, the two of us are great pals. But Jeremy didn't seem to recognise me which is surprising since we are both with the same literary agent. I can only imagine he's kicking himself now, thinking, damn it, was that Marion?
The next day I had a library event in North London at which one of the two other Waddling Duck authors also attending turned out to be the sweet and modest World War II pilot who was nominated for the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. I sent him an email:
'I see we're meeting again tomorrow - I promise you I am a lot nicer when not nervous and not drunk.'
'This is good news.' he replied.
I wasn't so sure, especially as the event promised both alcohol and nerves in equal measure, but when I arrived, he was the only person I knew and I clung to his superior literary reputation like an inconsequential limpet, trying desperately to be nice, as women came up and asked him to autograph his hardback. This was a lot cleaner than it sounds. We're talking librarians remember.
I met a lovely woman called Jodi from my local library who wondered if I would be interested in doing an event. Of course I would be, though my real local library is full of unemployed males, many of whom smell of Special Brew and I can't see them being overly interested in a black Notting Hill widow, except for spare change. In fact the library in question does feature in my novel. Oh yes, location, location, location. However, Jodi toils at the turnstile of a library at the posher end of the borough so I live in hope that some sleek book club will consent to read my book. And the fact that I could have driven to Chelsea with my resident's parking permit and met her there rather than trekking to North Bloody London, from my sickbed, high on Lemsip and low on sparkling conversation, is neither here nor there. Well in fact, it's there, at the far end of the Piccadilly line where nobody else but she wanted to meet me.
It was the cocktail party from hell's idea of hell.
'Are you librarians?' I asked a pair of pregnant ladies standing ominously close to a some swinging doors which hit me everytime someone left (there was practically a stampede for the exit), surely winning the prize for most original line at a library convention.
One laughed. 'They don't call us that any more, I'm a branch manager.' she said, exchanging a superior look with her friend. Yep, like that makes you any more interesting, dearie. But then they too swung out the doors and left me.
'I used to be a librarian,' I told another, trying in vain to strike up some camaraderie. The fact that I was 22 in a predominatly male higher educational establishment at the time and treated the place like Club 18-30 with books, wasn't mentioned. Oh well then, it was, I sort of blurted it out - nerves and drink and cold relief remedies... Amy Winehouse's adverse reaction to medication springs to mind. You really shouldn't mix antihistamine with booze.
The woman looked at me over her glasses. She was not amused.
I don't think any of them will be recommending my book to their readers.
I eventually introduced myself to another gushy author who just looked like a librarian, who was twittering on about what she was cooking for her children's supper (Pan MacMillan). 'I should run off home if you've had enough,' her publicist told me. 'Go on, nobody will miss you.'
God these people will go to any lengths to get rid of the competition...
much like my ex-husband who, when I arrived home, sick, coughing, feverish, tired and emotional,
was just on his way out, the last of his clothes packed into bags and boxes, piled up in the hallway.
I went upstairs, closed the doors of his empty wardrobe and got into bed.
Turns out there's some pain that Nurofen doesn't banish.
I went to a quiz somewhat lower down the scale. To the BBC to see a taping of Never Mind the Buzzcocks, to watch my friend Phill hum intros, none of which I could guess. I'm so unplugged I didn't even know who the other guests were except for one poor simple guy from a boy band, taunted so mercilessly by Simon Amstell, that I wanted to get up out if the audience and smack him. It was so cringingly painful, like the slow boy at school being picked on by the class clever dick. Even the person sitting next to me had his head in his hands, unable to watch.
And why do people think that standing in a line up being ridiculed is a great way to rejuvenate a fading career? The real show takes about three hours to film and the one hit wonders of yesteryear are standing out there under the lights for as long as twenty minutes trying to look impassive while the panelists make derisory remarks about them, just to take a three second bow. If that's funny then I've lost my sense of humour. It's like Bedlam with video clips.
I didn't really want to go to the Green Room afterwards, though the likes of Matthew Wright, apparently the host of a daytime chat show watched by the unemployed, and comedienne Katy Brand, are, as I'm sure you agree, hard to resist.
And yet, somehow I managed.
Phill looked tired. I was exhausted. We passed Paxo in the hall on the way out who also looked knackered. The two greeted each other with the same cordial familiarity I show the man from Viking Office Supplies - believe me, the two of us are great pals. But Jeremy didn't seem to recognise me which is surprising since we are both with the same literary agent. I can only imagine he's kicking himself now, thinking, damn it, was that Marion?
The next day I had a library event in North London at which one of the two other Waddling Duck authors also attending turned out to be the sweet and modest World War II pilot who was nominated for the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. I sent him an email:
'I see we're meeting again tomorrow - I promise you I am a lot nicer when not nervous and not drunk.'
'This is good news.' he replied.
I wasn't so sure, especially as the event promised both alcohol and nerves in equal measure, but when I arrived, he was the only person I knew and I clung to his superior literary reputation like an inconsequential limpet, trying desperately to be nice, as women came up and asked him to autograph his hardback. This was a lot cleaner than it sounds. We're talking librarians remember.
I met a lovely woman called Jodi from my local library who wondered if I would be interested in doing an event. Of course I would be, though my real local library is full of unemployed males, many of whom smell of Special Brew and I can't see them being overly interested in a black Notting Hill widow, except for spare change. In fact the library in question does feature in my novel. Oh yes, location, location, location. However, Jodi toils at the turnstile of a library at the posher end of the borough so I live in hope that some sleek book club will consent to read my book. And the fact that I could have driven to Chelsea with my resident's parking permit and met her there rather than trekking to North Bloody London, from my sickbed, high on Lemsip and low on sparkling conversation, is neither here nor there. Well in fact, it's there, at the far end of the Piccadilly line where nobody else but she wanted to meet me.
It was the cocktail party from hell's idea of hell.
'Are you librarians?' I asked a pair of pregnant ladies standing ominously close to a some swinging doors which hit me everytime someone left (there was practically a stampede for the exit), surely winning the prize for most original line at a library convention.
One laughed. 'They don't call us that any more, I'm a branch manager.' she said, exchanging a superior look with her friend. Yep, like that makes you any more interesting, dearie. But then they too swung out the doors and left me.
'I used to be a librarian,' I told another, trying in vain to strike up some camaraderie. The fact that I was 22 in a predominatly male higher educational establishment at the time and treated the place like Club 18-30 with books, wasn't mentioned. Oh well then, it was, I sort of blurted it out - nerves and drink and cold relief remedies... Amy Winehouse's adverse reaction to medication springs to mind. You really shouldn't mix antihistamine with booze.
The woman looked at me over her glasses. She was not amused.
I don't think any of them will be recommending my book to their readers.
I eventually introduced myself to another gushy author who just looked like a librarian, who was twittering on about what she was cooking for her children's supper (Pan MacMillan). 'I should run off home if you've had enough,' her publicist told me. 'Go on, nobody will miss you.'
God these people will go to any lengths to get rid of the competition...
much like my ex-husband who, when I arrived home, sick, coughing, feverish, tired and emotional,
was just on his way out, the last of his clothes packed into bags and boxes, piled up in the hallway.
I went upstairs, closed the doors of his empty wardrobe and got into bed.
Turns out there's some pain that Nurofen doesn't banish.
Tuesday, 25 November 2008
The secret life of mothers - the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize
I'm working in an office of dancing princesses, who skip off after work to this other world that starts when I stop.
Half the office is at the Cafe Royal where 30 tables of London's (g)literary elite show off their expensive educations and superior knowledge of all things bookish, while the other half get to show off their nominated, but absentee, author at the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize at the Century Club.
But instead of trudging home to undone taxes, the new washing machine (bought after the kids pulled the door off the last one) which is sitting in the middle of the kitchen blocking the sink, a broken dishwasher and assorted unsnapped mousetraps, I get to slip on my leopard skin shoes (by the bus stop on Shaftesbury Avenue) and join them.
I call Pierre who owns the Club to see if he's in the house. He used to own Odeon in Regent's Street when I was a restaurant critic, but alas he's at his other club, Paramount, at the top of Centrepoint. 'But pass by and have a drink, if you like, and bring a friend. I'll leave your name at the door.'
Yep, first find a friend. If my life was a board game I would still be on Go waiting to throw a six. Thank goodness I can take somebody else's turn.
I tag along with Glam Editor who meets someone she knows by the coat check. 'This is mumble, she says as I insert myself between them on the stairs. 'And this is my friend, Marion,' she adds kindly, because it's nicer than saying 'our office manager' which might prompt people to ask what the hell I am doing there.
Normal conversation:
'Where did you say you worked again?'
'Pedantic Press.'
'Oh really (impressed) and are you on the editorial side?'
'Erm, no, I answer the phone, buy lightbulbs, and write the... (they've already wandered off)...blog.'
We are given badges. With our names on. I have my own. It is thrilling. There is no mention of status, or its absence, as a large glass of wine is placed in my hand and speeches begin. Unfortunately - strike two after this morning's William Hill disappointment - our author doesn't win. Instead that honour goes to a man who announces in his acceptance speech (aren't men odd?) that a certain part of his anatomy allegedly looks like a Cornetto, which he then hastily denies. Too late, the image is branded on every woman's mind in conical, but not particularly comical, detail. A roomful of eyes flicker magnetically north, followed by a lot of hurried examination of the bottom of wine glasses with that liquid swirling, mmm, is this Soave? concentration before we all look at each other with wide eyes.
I can't stop wondering which way round the Cornetto is attached.
Mr mumble, is still pinned to the wall between me and Glamorous Editor, being incredibly charming. He has pinned his badge to the bottom of his jumper which dangles at Cornetto height and I can't bring myself to stoop and check either out. He is talking very modestly about the history book he is working on.
'Do you only write non fiction?' I ask hoping for clues to his identity.
'No, I've written four novels and...' he says. I fall off the cliff as he elaborates. Literary parties are not the place to go if you have an easily crushable ego. Mine is a coke can under his heel. Glamorous Editor chooses this moment to announce that I too have written a novel, but by then it's a bit like wearing a training bra in a room full of Page 3 girls. 'You know that it's not going to change your life,' he says with empathy as I fold my arms protectively over my chest.
'I work in publishing.' I say (look I do, I bloody do), 'so, yes I know there's not going to be any big fanfare.'
'I remember when my first novel came out, I kept expecting everything to be different and it was just another day.' It occurs to me that I must have heard of him if he's this prolific but it's a bit late to ask him to better annunciate his name. Is it ruder to just let the four novels float over my head as if they were trays of indifferent canapes as though I'm used to chatting with well-known authors everyday? Come on, when did I ever let a canape go past me?
'What did you say your name was?' I asked.
He repeated it. Quite clearly this time.
'Oh God,' I spluttered into my wine. 'I was talking to you completely naturally, and now I'll have to stop,' He looked puzzled. 'I know all your books. I've read them. I've bought them at airports. And now I'm going to be all overawed and babbling.' (And that would be different - how, exactly?) I wandered away, star-struck to cower inadequately with two of the other dancing princesses.
'A Cornetto?' said one to the other, mystified.
My own editor at Waddling Duck was in the corner with one of the other nominated authors who apparently has been up for all sorts of prizes but not won any. Yet. It's a great novel, set not a million miles away from Ginger Pig farming country. I feel I've been there. Hell, I have been there.
'Bad luck,' I tell him, and he looks embarrassed and a bit fed up. He shrugs: 'It's so awkward being consoled for something you didn't have any expectations of winning in the first place.' I rack my brain (which has become singular since the second glass of wine) for something that doesn't sound consoling and can only come up with a story about an Eartha Kitt album being the one thing I have ever won in my life. When I was nominated for Restaurant Critic of the Year, people didn't even clap because nobody had a clue who I was.
'And your point is?' he seems to say.
My attention is caught by a very pretty girl who suddenly falls over flat on the floor. Even dancing princesses get drunk, apparently. A man rushes over and 'oxters' her to her feet (it happens so frequently in Scotland we even have a verb for it, you see...) An oxter, for those of you interested in the Secret Life of Words is from the Old English oxta or ohstais and means an armpit. The rest should be self-explanatory.
It seemed like an auspicious moment to put my own leopard skin slippers into my bag and dance myself off up to Oxford Street for the long bus ride home. Paramount's panoramic views can wait for another night. I've got art homework to do, a pressing one thousand words to be milked from my marriage break up for the Sunday Times, five thousand words on cows to edit for the cookery book, a washing machine to plumb in, and mice to trap.
I also have a box of Cornettos to throw out of the freezer. Somehow, I've lost my taste for them.
.
Half the office is at the Cafe Royal where 30 tables of London's (g)literary elite show off their expensive educations and superior knowledge of all things bookish, while the other half get to show off their nominated, but absentee, author at the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize at the Century Club.
But instead of trudging home to undone taxes, the new washing machine (bought after the kids pulled the door off the last one) which is sitting in the middle of the kitchen blocking the sink, a broken dishwasher and assorted unsnapped mousetraps, I get to slip on my leopard skin shoes (by the bus stop on Shaftesbury Avenue) and join them.
I call Pierre who owns the Club to see if he's in the house. He used to own Odeon in Regent's Street when I was a restaurant critic, but alas he's at his other club, Paramount, at the top of Centrepoint. 'But pass by and have a drink, if you like, and bring a friend. I'll leave your name at the door.'
Yep, first find a friend. If my life was a board game I would still be on Go waiting to throw a six. Thank goodness I can take somebody else's turn.
I tag along with Glam Editor who meets someone she knows by the coat check. 'This is mumble, she says as I insert myself between them on the stairs. 'And this is my friend, Marion,' she adds kindly, because it's nicer than saying 'our office manager' which might prompt people to ask what the hell I am doing there.
Normal conversation:
'Where did you say you worked again?'
'Pedantic Press.'
'Oh really (impressed) and are you on the editorial side?'
'Erm, no, I answer the phone, buy lightbulbs, and write the... (they've already wandered off)...blog.'
We are given badges. With our names on. I have my own. It is thrilling. There is no mention of status, or its absence, as a large glass of wine is placed in my hand and speeches begin. Unfortunately - strike two after this morning's William Hill disappointment - our author doesn't win. Instead that honour goes to a man who announces in his acceptance speech (aren't men odd?) that a certain part of his anatomy allegedly looks like a Cornetto, which he then hastily denies. Too late, the image is branded on every woman's mind in conical, but not particularly comical, detail. A roomful of eyes flicker magnetically north, followed by a lot of hurried examination of the bottom of wine glasses with that liquid swirling, mmm, is this Soave? concentration before we all look at each other with wide eyes.
I can't stop wondering which way round the Cornetto is attached.
Mr mumble, is still pinned to the wall between me and Glamorous Editor, being incredibly charming. He has pinned his badge to the bottom of his jumper which dangles at Cornetto height and I can't bring myself to stoop and check either out. He is talking very modestly about the history book he is working on.
'Do you only write non fiction?' I ask hoping for clues to his identity.
'No, I've written four novels and...' he says. I fall off the cliff as he elaborates. Literary parties are not the place to go if you have an easily crushable ego. Mine is a coke can under his heel. Glamorous Editor chooses this moment to announce that I too have written a novel, but by then it's a bit like wearing a training bra in a room full of Page 3 girls. 'You know that it's not going to change your life,' he says with empathy as I fold my arms protectively over my chest.
'I work in publishing.' I say (look I do, I bloody do), 'so, yes I know there's not going to be any big fanfare.'
'I remember when my first novel came out, I kept expecting everything to be different and it was just another day.' It occurs to me that I must have heard of him if he's this prolific but it's a bit late to ask him to better annunciate his name. Is it ruder to just let the four novels float over my head as if they were trays of indifferent canapes as though I'm used to chatting with well-known authors everyday? Come on, when did I ever let a canape go past me?
'What did you say your name was?' I asked.
He repeated it. Quite clearly this time.
'Oh God,' I spluttered into my wine. 'I was talking to you completely naturally, and now I'll have to stop,' He looked puzzled. 'I know all your books. I've read them. I've bought them at airports. And now I'm going to be all overawed and babbling.' (And that would be different - how, exactly?) I wandered away, star-struck to cower inadequately with two of the other dancing princesses.
'A Cornetto?' said one to the other, mystified.
My own editor at Waddling Duck was in the corner with one of the other nominated authors who apparently has been up for all sorts of prizes but not won any. Yet. It's a great novel, set not a million miles away from Ginger Pig farming country. I feel I've been there. Hell, I have been there.
'Bad luck,' I tell him, and he looks embarrassed and a bit fed up. He shrugs: 'It's so awkward being consoled for something you didn't have any expectations of winning in the first place.' I rack my brain (which has become singular since the second glass of wine) for something that doesn't sound consoling and can only come up with a story about an Eartha Kitt album being the one thing I have ever won in my life. When I was nominated for Restaurant Critic of the Year, people didn't even clap because nobody had a clue who I was.
'And your point is?' he seems to say.
My attention is caught by a very pretty girl who suddenly falls over flat on the floor. Even dancing princesses get drunk, apparently. A man rushes over and 'oxters' her to her feet (it happens so frequently in Scotland we even have a verb for it, you see...) An oxter, for those of you interested in the Secret Life of Words is from the Old English oxta or ohstais and means an armpit. The rest should be self-explanatory.
It seemed like an auspicious moment to put my own leopard skin slippers into my bag and dance myself off up to Oxford Street for the long bus ride home. Paramount's panoramic views can wait for another night. I've got art homework to do, a pressing one thousand words to be milked from my marriage break up for the Sunday Times, five thousand words on cows to edit for the cookery book, a washing machine to plumb in, and mice to trap.
I also have a box of Cornettos to throw out of the freezer. Somehow, I've lost my taste for them.
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