sub-text

One of our authors was in town and going out to have lunch with Mr T on Friday. I booked the restaurant and confirmed the lunch by email, and then had his novel sitting on my desk for a week, waiting for him to sign it for me. But then I spent the morning packing White Tigers into a box in another office, followed by a meeting for the Ginger Pig, and when I looked at my watch it was five past one and the author had been and gone.

Damn it. This author lives in France, goodness knows when I would get the chance to see him again.

I wondered - for all of about point five of a second - if I could accidentally wander round to Cigala in Lamb's Conduit Street, and be uncool enough to be just passing with - oh look what I have here, what a coincidence - a copy of the book in my hand, and then sat down wearily at my desk. The first time Mr T took me out to lunch many years ago, in a land of restaurant critic popularity far, far and FT away, it was to Cigala. The last time it was to ASK pizza. I wasn't going anywhere.

Sigh.

I sat at my desk forlornly running through the upcoming weekend: dinner with glamorous friend Sarah in the evening which I would be cooking in my less than glamorous kitchen, then work: Ginger Pig. Ginger Pig. Ginger Pig. And just for a change, on Sunday, Ginger Pig. I supposed I could hang at the office on long enough to see whether Mr T brought him back after lunch and get the book signed then. I decided to text him and ask if this was likely.

I'm not gifted with the art of text. For a start I can't see. My kids always know when the message is from me simply because it's garbled and incomprehensible. I'm slow and clumsy and think it's the worst medium for communication in the world for all but the most cursory of messages when a telephone call would be too intrusive. People who would be embarrassed to call you and say they were canceling an appointment at the last minute think nothing of sending you a text. Friends have been dumped by text. It's the medium of the hurried, cowardly and rude.

Recently a friend sent a message asking when I was free to meet her. (Well I use the term friend loosely. Since I lost a husband she seems to be afraid divorce it's catching and hasn't been in touch except by the scintillatingly non-emotive and very occasional text to ask me how I am. Really. How do you *ing think I am? And how much do you really care if all you can do is text me twice in five months? Not that I'm bitter or anything...) After I had found my glasses, dropped the phone, pressed several wrong buttons and sent a blank message back, I read that she wanted me to arrange a meeting and offer her alternative dates. By text? Dear God, I'd rather sort out the Palestinians and the Israelis. By the time I had tapped that lot out I would be 106. So, I asked her to call me instead. She didn't. She had been in touch - her duty was done without once hearing my voice.

So frankly, I try to avoid texting whenever possible. This is particularly important to remember when drunk. However, in the middle of the day at the office, inebriation (for me at least) wasn't a problem, so I took a deep breath and picked up the phone, squinted, and tapped out the letters very, very slowly and painstakingly.

Are you bringing author

back to office. He so foot (damn that predictive text)

forget to get my book

signed, x (we're very affectionate at Pedantic Press)

I scrolled down and picked out T from my address book, and pressed send, then waited for around ten minutes to see if he would answer .

He didn't.

So, I left.

Twenty minutes later I was slumped sadly at the top of the No 7 bus when the phone chirruped.

Oh! Despite my reluctance to send texts I do like getting them providing they are not from Orange telling me that I can get a two for one cinema ticket on Wednesdays (rub it in, why don't you - where do I find the second person Orange?) or that I'm eligible for 'lucky numbers' so I can call all those friends I don't have at a lower rate. I live in perpetual hope that it's someone I really want to hear from. Even the Italian, now firmly in the past tense, occasionally sends me a message to see if we can meet. (So far we can't.) I reached for the phone. It was from Mr T and said:

? ? ? T x

What on earth did he mean by all the question marks - what possible ambiguity could there be in the message I sent him?

And then, before I could answer, the phone sang again and as I read the second message, which I will not reproduce here I was flooded (bright red) by a horrible realisation. I know two Mr Ts, and only one of them is in the contacts on my phone.

And it isn't the one I work for.

Had the mix up been the other way round I would have been very much more embarrassed, and only one of the reasons why I should only be allowed to operate a small hand-held devise even when sober. Another reason would be how the second Mr T managed to get into my address book in the first place.

But that story is for another day.

The last cut is the deepest

I'm in early Pig with delivery of the first phase of my manuscript for the Cookery Book in a couple of weeks' time.  Suddenly all my notes look like jigsaw pieces from the wrong puzzle and I rapidly need to find some edges.  A good place to beef up the framework seemed to be the Ginger Pig shop in Moxon Street so I thought I would trot along, meet some of the staff and pick their bones...

I fear there's going to be a lot of meat puns.

And also, apparently, an awful lot of men.

I've done a great many evening classes in my time: Italian, Salsa, Life Drawing, Cooking, Etching, Wine Tasting; Psychology - the whole gamut middle class pursuits and I can tell you from experience that adult education is a great place to meet men if you like women.

Men I have met at evening classes:

Italian?  One pervert looking for a reserve mistress to the mistress and a widow called Brian.

Life Drawing?  Naked man on a plinth with piercings you don't want to think about and one sexually ambiguous painter.

Cooking, Etching, Wine Tasting?  Sexually ambiguous painter (carried forward from above) and many, many bores..

Salsa?  Short, very short or gay men, bridegrooms (of which the last two categories have the advantage in that they use deodorant).  Phil from Brentford who does ballroom on Mondays, and my friend Andrew, who I took with me, so doesn't really count.  Thing in common:  they all sweat.

Psychology: come one...do you really need to ask?

Women I have met at evening classes: Concert violinist, Turkish journalist, Slow food campaigner, Ceramicist, Graphic Designer, Human Rights Lawyer, Divorce Lawyer (very, very useful), Weapon Designer (ditto), Conference Organiser, Banker, Caroline Waldegrave and Pru Leith (we're not friends but we still met), Australian Dentist, Architect, many brides (they do the salsa so they can dance at their weddings) and one sexually ambiguous painter (I'm not sure quite which category s/he comes into).

So that brings me back to the Ginger Pig.  It turns out a butcher's shop is a great place to meet men. 

Who would have thought it?

Nevertheless, in the evening, the shop is full of them.  Tall men.  Young men.  Silver foxes.  Some even have hair.  All are wearing white coats and interested expressions which makes them look a little like the guys on toothpaste ads who are trying to convince you they are scientists, or as though they might be about to sell you cosmetics on the Clinique counter in Selfridges.  But no - they are here to learn the gentle art of butchery on the course run by the two Ginger Pig butchers, three times a week.

Just what you want - a man who knows how to handle a hacksaw and a cleaver and can cut you up into freezer joints before you've even been properly introduced.  Not a category I've seen on Match.com. 

Yet.

Though surely only a matter of time?  Especially when you see how many of them come from City Banks...  Just what you do after a hard day's credit crunching...  cut up a carcass.

I look around the room for wedding rings as Perry (from the Marylebone shop) deftly cuts up a lamb, addressing the assembled throng with the confidence of a chat show host,  to the soft lulling hum of bones being sawn, and Borat (from the branch in Hackney, and known locally, so I'm told by members of the staff, as the Slovenian Sex God) shows me his own, totally ring-free hands.

'But you're too young,' I say as he twirls his filleting knife and slots it back into his holster (okay, I made that up, but it wouldn't have surprised me.'

'Oh 'e likes 'em really really pretty and gorgeous and slim,' said one of the female members of staff (who until that moment I was beginning to think of as a friend) and possibly, she seemed to be implying, not old enough to be his mother.

A man would need to have a cleaver in his hands to chop his way into my house through my three, ever-present, non-sleeping, disapproving teenagers, so it's academic that he's only 12 and I'm 76.  Instead, I  have to content myself with a glass of wine (red of course) and quiet contemplation of the scarred butcher's block on which a sheep is slowly becoming legs, breast and best end.

'So what do we call this,' Perry asks the assembled (creepily concentrated and silent) group of men standing around him in their lab coats paying rapt attention to the saw going through the spine then snapping off.  He slams down an indeterminate hunk of bones with a resounding thump.

'Scrag end,' says someone, helpfully.

Yep. 

Precisely.

From Fran at the New York Office

Give me an O

We're walking down the street at 1.30am.  Ahead someone is shouting 'give me an O, give me a B' and rippling down the street goes the cry O B A M A... Cyclists are whooping, motorists are beeping, and everyone else is stumbling home gripping each other, tired, hoarse, and happy.

We arrived at Amy's apartment for the first results, clutching our election bingo forms (courtesy of the Guardian), pens poised, ready to tick off the states as they're called and add up the electoral college votes aiming for the magic number: 270. By 7.30 the projections are already starting to come in - we mark off one fat lady in McCain's column, 3 in Obama's. I need a drink.

By the time we head to a bar it's 9.30 and the columns are filling up - Obama's line is looking healthy, the bigger numbers are with him, but I'm still feeling hugely superstitious - I keep knocking on wood, or in the absence of wood, my head.  I'm aware that this looks a bit bonkers, but I can't stop myself. We get in line for the bar, there are huge crowds of Brooklyn hipsters outside - it's one in, one out --  'let me put it this way' says the doorman 'if you were inside with a drink watching the results on a big screen, would you leave?'. Okay, we get his point,  but we're here now and it's amazing to be surrounded by all these people, so we do what Brits do best. We queue.

As we near the door we can hear screams from inside. 'WHAT??? ' 'Nooo'.... 'WHAT...'  'Can you believe it?' 'WHAT!' Bloody hell, this is frustrating. WHAT has happened?  Then it starts getting passed down. He's won Ohio. Holy crap, even I know this is big. About a minute later a girl shouts 'hey guys my sister just said he's got Ohio'. Everyone looks at her. Err, alright love - we heard already.

We consider starting a Chinese whisper about Texas...

Once inside and onto the 4th vodka (drinks here are kind of like electoral college votes - they have an arbitrary relationship to the volume of spirits they actually contain) we start to acclimatise. We're in the 'back room', which is a big as Brixton Academy. Your favourite band is playing.  All your friends are here. But everyone is staring at the biggest TV you've ever seen. As we get closer to the 'top of the hour' people start counting down with the clock and it goes eerily quiet. Colours flash on screen and numbers appear. Boos, cheers, cheers, boos, screams, hand clapping and dancing. I'm still nervous. I knock my head ('Fan, do you have tourette's?)

New Mexico for Obama. Wow.

The polls are closing in the West. I think we're reaching 11pm though I'm losing track.  The countdown starts and they're going to announce Virginia, or Florida perhaps, but then it comes on the screen. They are calling it for Obama.  He is the next president of the United States. So soon? I thought we were going to be here 'til 5 in the morning but no,  people are yelling, jumping up and down, punching the air. We are hugging each other and kissing strangers.  Amy throws her drink over everyone, forgetting that vodka doesn't have the same effervescent quality as champagne. 'Signed, sealed, delivered' comes blasting out of the huge speakers and we're all dancing. 'I don't know this song,' says my American Boy, Chris, as I try to whirl him around. I think he's worse than the girl outside.

As McCain comes out to concede the crowd again is quiet.  A couple of people boo but generally we are respectful, clapping - some even commenting that if this is how he'd conducted himself during the race, he may have stood a better chance. Palin gets a big boo, and no respect - from the crowd gathered here, anyway.

And then it's time for Him - and you know the rest.

written by Frances Owen, Publicity Manager  currently on sabbatical at Grove/Atlantic New York 

Maya Fiennes. Kundalini Yoga Workshop.

Sixty middle aged women in various stages of preservation from good to very good, and one from Pedantic Press.

Me.

Originally six of us had planned to attend the workshop since we are soon to publish Maya's book, but only two of the young bendies made it in the end, and I roped in my friend Nel for solidarity.

Naturally we sat at the back.

I’ve done Yoga before. It’s the exercise of choice for anyone who isn’t otherwise athletic. But Maya’s Yoga for Life isn’t quite like anything I’ve done before. Instead of inelegant postures, holding positions for a long time, and lots of deep breathing imagining yourself putting roots down into the earth – obviously a dawdle for me given my gravitational affinity with the ground, Kundalini Yoga, on first acquaintance anyway, involves fast, concentrated breathing, simple rapid and repetitive movements and lots of singing and chanting.

Easy, I thought when we began. A billion breaths later I was hyperventilating and the inside of my nose felt like I had been snorting chlorine in a swimming pool. Who knew breathing was so hard?

This was a de-stress class. Ideal for many of we Pedants; especially designed even. As the class progressed and after I had, in Maya’s words, ‘broken through the pain barrier,’ pushing my palms out to the side a million and a half times, it got easier and the breathing began to feel energising.

And I couldn't feel my fingers, my shoulders or indeed anything much above the waist, which obviously helped, especially when we began rolling around the floor from side to side like hippos.

Then suddenly my friend Nel put her hands over her eyes. Poor thing, it’s getting too much for her. I reached across to pat her back consolingly. I thought she was weeping at first, and then I saw her shoulders shake and realised she was indeed crying, but with laughter.

'I’m sorry,' she gasped, I just can’t help it. I can’t stop looking at the man with the giant harp – a series of steel wires strung the length of the room, which was of concert hall proportions, which he was stroking earnestly making the room reverberate to Eastern music while sixty loud London women sang 'Harr', like fairly aggressive pirates as they stared fixedly at the space between the outstretched thumb and fingers of their right hands.

It wasn’t helped by the fact that Nel is quite deaf and couldn’t hear any of the instructions that Maya was issuing prettily from a sound system far, far away, so she really didn't have a clue what she was doing.

Next we sang and chanted five words over and over interspersed with the chorus “I bow to you, again and again.’ At which Nel took issue. She bows to nobody. She can bow to nobody – too much belly fat.

Then we rested, breathing gently.

And the harpists mobile phone went off to the tune of Woody Woodpecker.

I didn't even dare glance at Nel. But being deaf, she hadn't heard it. She was still laughing though.

'Do you want to get a drink?' I asked one of the bendies as we left the workshop.

'Marion, that was supposed to be all about cleansing your system and strengthening your kidneys!' she said sternly. 'And anyway, I can't. I'm on a detox.'

'Okay then,' I mumbled, much chastened as Nel skipped off like a newborn lamb to go and sign up for a yoga holiday, bought a yoga mat, a yoga seat, and some incense.

'I tell you what though, let's go outside and get some fresh air.' said the Bendy. 'I could really do with a fag.'

It’s Halloween.

We don't usually dress up, but Ms Rights said she had been looking for her tiara that morning.

I thought she wore it every day. 

‘Only mentally, Marion, only mentally,’ she said.  ‘And what about your broomstick?  Is that why you always look so cheerful?’

For the record, I never look cheerful. But I was more concerned with the ‘underneath the venom, there’s a happy person’ implication.

The other day she arrived at work clutching a latte and announced that she needed some advice.

‘My husband came back from the States and gave me a pair of suspenders.  Red suspenders.  What do you think this means?’

‘To much information,’ I thought but tried to appear unperturbed.  ‘I think it probably means he would like you to wear them dear,’ I said, trying to rapidly banish the resulting picture from my head.

‘Yes, but you don’t understand, they’re Gordon Gekko suspenders, you know – the sort you wear to hold up your pants…’

Ah, American suspenders…  Braces.  Trousers not knickers.  Got you.  I should know this stuff since I’ve spent the last month inserting these very words and their siblings into my book to make it more, well, American for the publisher on the other side of the pond.

But now I was even more perturbed.  ‘Why is he buying you braces?’

'I don't know, that's what I'm wondering...'

‘Does he like you to wear men’s clothes?’ asked another, whose meek voice belayed the fact that she won the ‘unfortunate things I did in my youth’ contest in the office the other week, up against a lot of fierce, very fierce competition.

‘Have his mother, sister, female friend, cousin, whatever,  take him aside and tell him what constitutes an appropriate present for a woman,’ I counselled.

Banish from the list: braces, gladioli, carnations, a Magimix, cosmetic sets bought on planes (we generally wear one shade of lipstick and don’t need three others in crap colours) more than two airport perfumes in which we’ve expressed an interest, and a tea-tray with four cups and saucers.  The final item was the gift I received on the last birthday my husband spent at home.

I should have known then something was afoot.

Cold calling

This morning, on the way to work the phone rang...  It was someone who used to commission me and who kept me off the breadline at various points in my life but it has been a while since he has returned any of my calls. Today however, he was on the line.

Chatting.

About his cold.

He didn't mention the book proof which I know my publishing company sent him, and about which I had thought, in my giddy, excited naivety, he would be pleased - in the way a friend would.  I waited for him to say something - anything - until it's the elephant in the room, but apparently only I can see it.  Oh dear Lord, how awful it is when you send someone your book and the response is deafening silence.  I feel it at work when we parcel up our own proof copies and dispatch them to people we hope will say something nice to put on the cover, and it's like they've fallen off the end of the world without even a splash.  However, it's worse when it's your own.  I mean, even 'thanks' would be nice.  I'm not expecting a three ring circus or a plot analysis.

Instead he spoke for a good five minutes about his self-confessed 'man-flu', and about being laid low, and how he was 'zapping' it with Echinacea and Beechams Cold and Flu relief.  Ah yes, the art of sparkling conversation is not yet dead.  This is one of the advantages of not living with a man - that you don't have to sympathise while hearing lurid descriptions of their snot.

Eventually after he'd talked about his steam treatment, I crumbled and asked him if the book arrived.  He muttered an off hand yes.   The way I do when a sales representative asks me if I'm the person who deals with our environmental waste management.

 'You won't read it will you?'  I said in wearily defeatist mode.

'No...' he agreed, before insisting that it was lying around somewhere.

(Sound of indeterminate scrabbling)

I sigh.  I got six copies and have only two left and he has one 'lying around somewhere...'

'Well will you pass it on to someone else for me?'

He mumbled something discouraging about the book pages of his paper, intimating that it wouldn't really be quite their thing being all paperbacky but offered to give it to his 'kid' who is 33 because 'she likes girlie books'.

'It's not that girlie,' I protested, 'it's quite dark.'

I couldn't help myself from exaggerating hugely about how pleased the Waddling Duck Overseas sales' departments were (believe me, to hear me tell it - they know my name in India where, as you can imagine, the Delhi housewife is going to be enthralled by the domestic life of a West London psychopathic housekeeper), but he remained unimpressed by my blatant lying.

I could practically hear him yawning.

'And our author Aravind's White Tiger won The Man Booker,' I added, bringing out the big guns for good measure, refraining to mention it was the only ruddy thing that anyone wanted to talk about at last night's Meet The Press night at Waddling Duck at which I was supposed to be plugging myself.

'Yeah, is it any good?' he drawled.

'Of course it's good.  It's fantastic.  It won.'

But his only response was to reprise his minute by minute pharmaceutical treatment of his bad cold (aka man-flu).

Bless him.

Getting your book published is only the first hurdle in a long, long battle.  Next you have to get bookshops to sell it and then you have to pray someone will read it.  What hope is there when you can't even persuade some of your friends and acquaintances to flick through further than the acknowledgments?    The woman (very, very nice woman) from Radio Four said that she gave each book 50 pages.

Maybe I should have slipped in fivers?

You may remember the self-published book I was sent recently on the slush pile with a quote that the author had added on the back from 'my friend Dave'.  I'm now worried that I may not even be able to muster up that:

'I read a good book today.  Yours.'  My eldest daughter (who lives with me, food, rent-free and with all utilities paid).

'I read a bit and then I put it down.'  My youngest daughter (as above).

'It really stayed with me.'  Fran in Pedantic Press Publicity Department (sits behind me, within easy reach of hot liquids and scissors, recently moved to New York Office).

'It's good.  Everything you do is good.'  Husband.  Before leaving.

'I might not like it.'  My best friend Nel.

'Can you change the ending?'  American publisher.

Feel free to jump in anytime.

Anyone?

Okay then, tenners?

A bottle of champagne for the best one?

First born son?  (Actually he's unemployed, lives at home etc, but has great hair and is very cute...)

Meet the Press at Waddling Duck

The publicity machine trundles along, or in my case creaks, much like my aching joints as I hobble in heels along The Strand to Waddling Duck for a Meet The Press session with my fellow spring authors. 

I’m a little nervous as readers of this blog will have by now ascertained that 'meeting' is not my strong point.  I can sometimes enjoy a party, despite all claims to the contrary, but like marriage, monogamy and motherhood, it’s more the idea that appeals to me.  I like the anticipation, the fantasy, the notion.  By the time it's a reality it's too late - you're there, stuck in a corner, doing it, with only alcohol to dull the pain.  

So what do you wear to meet the press?  Once upon a time I was the press and I don't remember anyone dressing up for me.  The other problem is lighting in as much as, at home, in the 4pm gloom of my bedroom, I don't have any.  Naturally, this means that when I'm getting ready by 40 watt bulb, I look simply wonderful - but not so much when standing on the 10th Floor of Waddling House Corporate Headquarters under spotlights that do the same for the face as holding a torch under it, but in reverse.  My eldest daughter had helpfully rubbed in a bit of unblended concealer before I left the house (breeding does, apparently, have its advantages) but after that I was on my own with a glass of cava in a room the size of Terminal 5 with a lot of people wearing sticky badges, most of which seemed to herald that they were not, in fact, Press, but employees.  

Young employees.

It appears that the press were somewhat under-represented though those who did drag themselves across  London for a free drink were quite senior literary editors lured, no doubt, by names like Alain de Botton - whose Waddling Duck minder stuck to his side like glue in a sweater - rather than that of, say, Marion McUnpronounceable.  I was recently invited to one of his School of Life singles evenings by a friend.  Even the thought made me want to curl up like a cold canape and throw myself into the nearest swing bin.  Not least because I imagine they are full of women.  Clever women.  Everything is full of women.  (Please God, women who read!) There are times, this being yet another in the long conveyor belt of such moments since the husband became unhinged and unhitched, when I realise that not only have I woken up to a brand new world full of women, but that I have also woken up to a brand new world full of young women.  

At work the other day during a heated discussion over whether or not Russell Brandt should resign (American election, what American election?) I mentioned that the Beeb could always hire him back later: 'Remember, like they did with Kenny Everet?'

'Kenny who?'  said one of my co-workers.

'You, know - Kenny..?'  and then my voice trailed off.  That's the problem.  They don't.

'Leonard Cohen?'

'Is he one of the Burn after Reading brothers?' 

And they are everywhere: sitting at the desks surrounding me in the office, standing in the huddle into which I insinuated myself the other night at the book launch, hanging around my house eating my food claiming to be blood kin, and now here, swarming at Waddling Duck.  My lovely editor looks like she's stepped out of the pages of  Tatler.  My publicist, doe-eyed, winsome and slim as a bread-stick stands next to me and immediately supersizes me to a Happy Meal with extra fries, and then I see a tall, leggy girl with blonde curly hair tumbling down her back talking to Andrew Holgate from The Sunday Times and think she is the journalist from Vogue.  It's not until the Publicity Director at Waddling Duck (also impossibly young) tells me her name that I realise she's actually my Publisher who, on the basis of one short meeting, I seem to have embossed in my memory on a pedestal of glossy, corporate seniority in a Chanel Suit and Anna Wintour shades.  There are even boys, boys, with managerial titles, and less facial hair than some of my women friends...

So where are all the birds my age, I wonder (apart from hurriedly having electrolysis?)  Have I stumbled into the publishing equivalent of Logan's Run?


(Logan's what?)

But no.  They exist.  They're out there writing books judging by the other female authors.  All three of my fellow novelists must be at least in my ball park (okay I'm downscaling, on the grounds of tact).   One of them, another mother of four, can surely remember Kenny.  She has a daughter older than mine.  Not a ruddy line on her face though, and no body fat.  I know.  I checked.  That intent look when I'm talking to you is not me being absolutely riveted by what you say (though that too) - it's me desperately trying to identify a wrinkle so I can feel less like the Cryptkeeper surrounded by nubile nymphs.

None of the authors I wanted to meet appeared.  How to meet a man after 40?  Not a sign of her.  (Get a wedding ring, I would say.  It always seemed to have a magical effect for me, albeit with the wrong sort of sleazy man who touchingly imagines being married makes you 'safe').  Or Split: 'I want a divorce.'  Surely we two would have a great deal in common?  Even The Idle Parent would have been nice to know, since its a philosophy I have long held and practiced.  

'I thought you must be the stalker woman,' said a male author.  

'No' I said, offended.  

'I meant the woman who had been stalked,' he added.

'Still no.  Though I did have a stalker once,'  I replied to his back.

'Yes, me too,' he said airily, lest I think I was special.

I asked Andrew Holgate if he was married.  'Yes, 29 years,' he replied defensively, stepping back just a tad (perhaps worried that I was about to apply my own criteria for sleaziness).

'Good,' I said.  'Please get your wife to read my book.  It's about a woman who runs away,' I add, quickly, wondering if Will Skidelsky is also married and I can lean on him for his wife before he goes.

Target audience, darling, target audience.