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Excerpt from sleeve notes:
A Little Palace is a comic fairy tail set in a fictional suburb of
Manchester. It tells the story of control freak, Alb Wakes who bullies his wife and treats his three
daughters like navves. But when larger than life Tundra moves in next door, things begin to change. She
and her son open up a Pandora's box of new horizons for the women. When Alb spies Tundra cavorting naked
with the Norfax bank manage, he finally loses his grip...
You can buy it here, and I wish
you would...
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saturday 28th
I went to a talk by an author whose latest novel I’d enjoyed, at the
local library yesterday. She’d won some literary prize for it, the talk was free and there were refreshments
laid on so I expected to be able to sit back, comfortably anonymous amongst a rag bag of pseudo intellectuals,
local literati and people who’d come in out of the rain, all of whom would whip up an informed and heated
debate whilst I sat there feeling very pleased with myself, thinking "Well aren’t I the cultured one!"
I got there with five minutes to go to find that the audience in fact comprised of me, one of
her mates who’d come along to support her, a woman from her publishing house and the librarian who’d
organised it, who kept fluttering on about 11am on a Friday being "a terribly difficult time to attract
the right sort of people to these sort of events", when in fact it was her piss poor attempts at publicity
which were probably to blame for the poor turn out (one tiny poster on the communal notice board, lost
amongst the other notices for transgender tai chi classes and bus passenger action groups).
In
the circumstances it seemed impolite to make my customary bolt for the back row and I felt obliged to
sit right up front, where there was no escaping eye contact with the author. We eyed each other nervously.
“Never mind”, she said, “if nobody else turns up you and me will have a good chat over a nice cup tea”.
Gulp! Oh bugger, balls, piss and shit! Being at home with the baby, I haven’t had an intelligent
thought since roughly this time last year, much less been able to express it coherently. My daily reading
consists almost exclusively of the showbiz pages on teletext (p540 BBC, p110 ITV. Also, Bamboozle on
C4 (p152) is good and quite difficult, I find. You have to answer a series of multiple choice questions
and if you get one wrong you get knocked back to the earlier ones. I've only made it all the way to the
end once without making a mistake, apart from on Saturdays when they run a children’s versions, when
I usually do quite well).
Nobody else did turn up, so she started off with a brief outline of
the book and its characters (I didn't have the heart to tell her that I'd already read it. Twice.) and
then read a couple of extracts from it, which I would have enjoyed, but unfortunately, overcome with
performance anxiety over the impending literary debate, I spent most of the time trying to think up intelligent
sounding questions to ask her when she’d finished and consequently didn’t really listen to her. All
I could come up with was “Where do you get the ideas for your novels from?” and “What would you have
like to have been if you had not been a novelist, please?” Luckily, towards the end of the reading another
woman came in, and thankfully she seemed unable to keep her gob shut, rattling off a series of questions
far more crass than mine, and so in the end I didn’t have to resort to them.
After a while the
conversation moved on to popular fiction. The librarian really got on my tits by lolling back in her
chair and voicing disdain for the choices made by the book reading public, confirming what I have always
suspected about librarians, which is that they use your borrowing preferences as a basis for sneering
at you. “You should see the length of the reservation lists for the latest Wilbur Smith or J K Rowling”
she smirked. “I’m like “He-llo! There are other books in the library you could read, y’know!” I really
think those sorts of people should be banned from coming in!”
“If it bothers you so much ”, I
said, tartly, “rather than simply castigating them for their choice of material shouldn't you be finding
ways to introduce them to a wider range of work?” Everyone nodded earnestly and she threw me a sour look
which suggested that the first thing she was going to do on returning to her desk was to check out my
borrowing history with every intention of enjoying a good sneer. Well hah! because I have nothing to
hide there. I only joined last September, and since then my lending choices have been exemplary (chiefly,
it has to be said, because I half fancied one of the librarians on the check out desk and some of the
books were chosen out of a pathetic attempt to impress him, and sat on the shelf, untouched, for a month
when I got them home), with only Ainsley Harriet’s Meals in Minutes slightly letting the side down.
On the way out I got the author to sign my copy of her book. It's in pretty good condition so I live
in the faint hope that if she ever becomes really successful my signed first edition will buy me that
retirement villa on the Algarve.
I think you owe it to me to help make that dream come true by
buying this book in large quantities.
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