Thoughtcat’s Man in New Zealand, Chris Bell, recently wrote a very good short story called Kind of Blue: A five-part seduction fantasy, which not only looked to the great Miles Davis album for its inspiration, theme and structure but, in a nod to the way jazz records are made, the first draft was also “improvised” along to the record in real time. Even though, by his own admission, Chris did revise that first draft a few times before he was happy to unleash it on the NZBC blog to which he is a regular contributor, the idea of approaching a short story “[without] a preordained plot and a line of action, [trying] to get most of it down during one sitting, beginning with a sketch, and attempting to capture the spirit of discovery with no unnatural or interrupted strokes” was, I thought, a great idea. My imagination captured, with Chris’s permission I’ve started The Great Kind of Blue Story Challenge, which invites Alan Sundry to beat Chris at his own game. The “rules” are, basically, to write a story, about anything you like, in a single sitting, while listening to Kind of Blue, then email the result to us. So come on, then, if you think you’re ‘ard enough…
All posts by tc
The day I met… whatshisname
Last Saturday (22nd April) was a great day: it was my birthday and the sun was shining. My wife, baby son and I went out to meet some friends in nearby Chiswick, and ended up having lunch at Sam’s Brasserie, which we’d never been to before. It was a very cool place and our brunch-type dishes were both delicious and inexpensive. We’d been there for a quarter of an hour or so when another young family came in and sat in the far corner of the section where we were sitting. I had my back to them, but they were in full view of my wife and, when he turned round – which of course he was doing all the time anyway – our little boy. After a moment we realised he’d seen something, or someone, he liked the look of, and soon he and this other baby were “communicating” at some volume across the restaurant, much to the entertainment of us, the other family and the tables in between. I carried on chatting to our friends and was suddenly aware that this other small person had come over to our table. In fact, she’d been brought over by a parent, and was now smiling beside me while our son chatted to her. What a lovely thing for the parent to do, I thought, turning to say hello, and got something of a shock when I realised said parent was Bob Dylan. Actually, no, it wasn’t Bob, but it got your attention. It was in fact Krishnan Guru-Murthy, one of the presenters of Channel 4 News, who is just as famous as Bob, at least in our house. This was a funny thing because Channel 4 News is Thoughtcat’s favourite TV news programme, and in the months when the Thoughtkitten was very new our regular evening routine was to sit down in front of the TV at precisely 7pm when the show started and have a bottle (of milk in TC Jnr’s case and wine in TC Snr’s). “Well, you know who this man is, don’t you?” I said to TC Jnr, who gurgled his approval while I told KG-M the story. He laughed and introduced us to his baby, Jasmine.
I must have been star-struck because at this point I realised I’d completely forgotten KG-M’s name. I racked my brains and was about to say to TC Jnr, “Say hello to Sanjeev Bhaskar,” but something stopped me. I’m very glad it did; the embarrassment may have killed all of us.
Anyway, as if all this weren’t sufficient excitement for one birthday lunch, as we left the restaurant – I still unable to remember Sanjeev’s actual name, and all of us waving heartily to each other as if we’d been friends for years – we passed another table in a different section, at the head of which was the fat(ish) unshaven bloke from Man Stroke Woman. This time not even the wrong name came into my head because I realised I’d never known what his name was. (If it’s any consolation, I couldn’t name any of the other MSW performers either.) Anyway, we made a rapid exit before we could bump into any more celebrities whose names I’d forgotten, or didn’t know, or whom I could mix up with other celebrities who bore no relation to them whatsoever.
I was going to write up this story last weekend, but didn’t get round to it, so it was with a mixture of delight and frustration that I opened this Saturday’s Guardian Weekend magazine to read that Krishnan G-M was the author of this week’s Last Weekend column, in which a famous person writes a few hundred words about what they did last weekend (hence the name). KG-M did mention the lunch trip to Sam’s, and also said he saw the fat(ish) bloke from Man Stroke Woman, whom he usefully named as Nick Frost – of course! – but sadly didn’t say anything about Jasmine and TC Jnr’s entertaining conversation. The irony is that if I had called him Sanjeev Bhaskar, that would probably have been the highlight of the column, if not exactly his weekend.
Cherie Blairdo, or: Modesty is the best policy
Columnists are falling over each other to declare themselves either for or against Cherie Blair following the news this week that she’s invoicing the Labour Party for her £275-a-day hairdressing bill incurred during last year’s election, which runs to some £8,000 – more than one Labour backbencher spent on his entire 2005 campaign.
“Once you’ve had a £275 hairdo, it’s pretty hard to go back to a £50 one,” protests the Grauniad’s Hannah Pool, who by pure coincidence is the paper’s fashion correspondent. Isn’t this humbuggery at its best? Fifty quid is probably as much as my mum, for instance, has ever spent (or been able to spend) on a hairdo and I doubt I’m the only one who can’t tell the difference between their mum’s locks and Cherie’s.
Meanwhile, in the same paper (or at least, on the same website) Helene Mulholland defends Cherie on the basis that she’s damned if she does get her hair done and damned if she doesn’t, the latter because of her notorious bad hair days, starting with the morning after Labour’s original 1997 landslide when she was filmed opening the door to Number 10 to accept a bunch of flowers from a well-wisher having obviously just got out of bed, complete with a barnet that could have been designed by Salvador Dali.
The reality is that she and her husband were so popular at that time – and, apparently, deservedly so – that everyone loved her for answering the door with surrealist hair. Not even the biggest cynic could have begrudged that to a woman whose life had just changed forever, who’d been up all night celebrating, who had every reason to celebrate, who had just at that moment discovered the reality that she was no longer an ordinary person but now in the constant media glare.
Modesty tends to endear you to people somewhat more than ostentation, and if Cherie had spent a little less money over the years that followed consulting lifestyle gurus and a bit more time on the things that matter, she might instead have found herself taken to the nation’s hearts. This would have enabled her to have a bad hair day every day, saving the Labour Party a fair sum.
The whole story is the perfect metaphor really for the massive affection for (and trust in) New Labour that the government has squandered over the past decade. They could have had it all – instead they screwed us.
Today’s Sunday Times has at least two columns about Cherie’s latest mammon-friendly stunt. India Knight joins the ranks of (apparently exclusively female, and no doubt immaculately-coiffeured) hacks who are kissing Cherie’s bum so fiercely that the Labour Party will soon be in receipt of another Cherie bill, this time for an industrial vat of sore-arse cream.
Rod Liddle however says it all for me: “Aside from betraying the people who raised the money, it’s also betraying the people that Labour purports to represent. I mean, it’s hardly a statement of solidarity with the downtrodden masses, is it. Spending more than six times the (daily) minimum wage on a quick wash ’n’ blow dry pretty much every day for a month might strike some of Labour’s working-class supporters, if there are any left, as a tad extravagant.
“The Labour party is also skint, on the verge of bankruptcy. Poor Peter Kilfoyle MP fulminated when he heard about Cherie’s bill that this was double what he had to spend on his entire election campaign.
“Then there’s the presumption and the double standards. Quite clearly Cherie Blair feels she has every right to expect the Labour party — or someone, anyway, so long as it’s not her — to pick up the hairdressing bill. She seems suffused with a resentment that her various costs are not more frequently borne by the members of her party, or better still the taxpayer.
“She has been known to whinge that she incurs expenses merely through being the prime minister’s wife when, as everybody knows, because we keep being told, she is a Very Real Woman in her own right with an important and intellectually demanding job.
“However, disaffection with life at No 10 is quickly banished when there’s the chance to trouser vast sums on foreign lecture circuits, billed as the wife of Tony Blair. I may be wrong but my guess is that the filthy-rich denizens of Palm Beach’s Everglades club would not have paid £30,000 to hear a speech from some leftie, limey human rights lawyer who had just co-authored a massive — and massively boring — book on tort. As visiting attractions go, it’s hardly Jackie Mason, is it. They forked out because they thought she was Britain’s first lady.”
Cats in the news
Thoughtcat has never really been a topical cat site – I prefer references to classic cats, if any at all; the cat theme was always a metaphor anyway (darling) – but I couldn’t help noticing a sudden rash of cat stories in the news in the past few days, and it seems churlish not to give them a mention. Firstly on 4th April Elizacat brought to my attention Lewis the “crazy Connecticut cat”, who’s been terrorising a small town (specifically, an Avon lady who is now suing him – only in America, eh!) and is now “under house arrest” (Lewis, not the Avon lady; only in America #2) on pain of having his claws removed, or being put down altogether. Lewis now has his own MySpace site and several hundred “friends” are clubbing together to protest his “human rights”. Then this weekend a New York moggy called Molly was finally released after two weeks of being stuck inside the walls of a Greenwich Village building. Now today Thoughtcat hears of a German cat who saved the life of a newborn baby abandoned in a freezing Berlin doorway, by meowing repeatedly until someone came out and rescued the child. They say these things come in threes, so unless cats are taking over the world this will probably be all for the moment. Argh, no, hang on! What about the evil “cat nurses” in last night’s (excellent) new Doctor Who series opener? I think their being cats was a bit random, but they looked good.
Fame at last – Thoughtcat in the London Informer
A few weeks ago I had an email from a journalist on a weekly free local newspaper called the Informer, asking permission to include Thoughtcat in “London Blog”, a regular feature profiling bloggers from the area and printing typical extracts from their blogs. I’d never seen the article before (I think the paper gets delivered to my address, but so do a couple of others, and in honesty they generally all end up being recycled before I even register what they’re called) and I was initially suspicious, doubting that a local free paper would really be interested in blogs and thinking one of my mates was winding me up. However, the journalist’s email address was kosher and he said he’d found the blog from a credible source (London Bloggers, a stylish directory I’d joined some time ago), so without further delay I wrote back to say I’d be delighted. He asked for a bit of background, including my age and location, and a photo. I provided him with some info on Thoughtcat and, not knowing the layout, asked if he just wanted a small close-up of my whiskers or a full length shot of me (which, thinking about it, wouldn’t actually be much different in size, but there you go). I also offered him a few suggestions for “typical extracts” from Thoughtcat, since I modestly assumed finding such a thing amid three years’ and 50,000 words of blog posts might be difficult. However, said journo then vanished for several days, leaving me unsure whether he’d actually written the article or had gone off the idea, or still needed the photo, so – now paranoid once again that this was in fact an elaborate practical joke – I gave him a nudge. A few days later he reappeared and said the feature was out, illustrated with a photo he’d found on the site, and if I gave him my address he’d send me a copy. I did, and waited.
I was still nervous about the result: would it be a hatchet job? A tabloid stitch-up? A honey-trap preying on my vanity? I imagined myself imagining a glorious write-up, newspapers banging on the Thoughtcat-flap begging me to write for them for real money, little suspecting the reality – a huge photo of me looking ridiculous, a picture I’d put on the site years before and forgotten about, with a quote twisting my carefully-chosen words to paint me as a bizarre nimbyist eccentric, a closet nazi living with 17 cats, spending his days self-publishing insane pamphlets calling on McVities to bring back Dad’s Cookies and the local council to bomb McDonald’s – or worse, claiming I was a Tory voter.
Thankfully, having now received the paper containing the feature (it’s the 31st March issue, local folks!) none of that is the case, and although the majority of the article is composed of my own words I hope I’m allowed to say I think the results are excellent. It is still a little eccentric, but that’s probably appropriate, and in any case it’s fascinating to see how you come across to people: From his small flat, cat-obsessed [am I??] Richard Cooper (pee-Cooper to his friends) [what this must sound like with no Thai context God only knows] muses on everything from sausages [where?!] to political scandals. The novelist-cum-biscuit taster [apart from sounding faintly disgusting this omits to mention I have never been either, at least on a professional basis] flirted with fame after becoming embroiled in a row over authorship of a book called All My Own Work [this will come back to haunt me!], after he based his title on a poem by Ted Hughes [surreally, this makes Hughes sound as if he was the aggrieved party in the AMOW debacle]. Click and you arrive at: Lord Profumo, Albrecht Durer, Mince Pies, Mobile Phones, Blues, Leonard Cohen [yay!], Basil Fawlty [true, but only I think in the context of ‘Don’t mention the war’ from last summer’s election], InterRail [hmm, I’m impressed – the journo’s had a look around the main site and found my account of our French InterRailing trip!], Buena Vista Social Club [it gets better], Randy Newman [again a one-off, but can’t be bad] and Russell Hoban [double yay! – whether Russ will appreciate it in this dubious context I don’t know, but I’m honoured to be responsible for even the smallest press mention of his hallowed name].
So far, so weird – but it gets weirder. The blog feature itself is right at the back of the paper, sandwiched between adverts for a plumbing and heating company and the Modhubon Tandoori (“Eat as much as you like for £4.95!”), and just overleaf from a double-page of classified ads divided equally between man & vans and escort agencies (“Za Za… Irish fire cracker… Japanese goddess”). The rarefied company I find myself in is infinitely enhanced by a huge picture of Bob Dylan c.1966, as I realise with delight (and some relief, when I think of some of the possible alternatives) that the blog post the journalist has chosen to represent Thoughtcat is the recent one about Dylan snubbing the UK Music Hall of Fame awards. DYLAN DISHES IT, runs the headline. Richard says Bob Dylan has the right idea about music award shows, says a caption beside my photo, which turns out to be the one of me from my about page wearing a THAILAND t-shirt and eating a bowl of my wife’s best green curry. “What’s the point in giving an award to an artist who’s been around for decades?” bewails a quote splashed in white letters across Dylan’s black jacket, while the main image is captioned BOB’S YOUR UNCLE: Dylan the legend (obviously just in case anyone’s unsure of who it is, or that it may be me).
The rest of the page is composed of the blog entry, reproduced fairly faithfully, albeit with the original Blair-unfriendly ending excised in favour of a cynical comment on the Eurythmics’ Christmas greatest hits cash-in. In fact it’s interesting that, although Blair does get a mention elsewhere, it’s not a critical one, and you wouldn’t guess from reading the feature that I can’t stand the man; did the Informer get cold political feet, despite it being quite clear that the article represents the personal opinion of one slightly bonkers local blogger? Whatever the truth, just to put the record straight, I CAN’T STAND TONY BLAIR. (In seriousness I must curtail this habit of beating Blair with any stick I can find. I mean, for God’s sake – when you’re writing about Bob Dylan and the ludicrosity of music award shows, to still manage to squeeze in a Tone-moan just looks facile and opportunistic – not unlike Blair, in fact, the bastard!!!)
Blair or no Blair, if I say so myself, the profile of Thoughtcat appears to represent a cultural high for at least this edition of the paper. Headlines on other pages include:
LICENCE TO KILL: Is our under-fire prison system putting killers on YOUR street?
Leak hotel fined
Anger over repair demands
IT HAPPENED TO ME: I built a Viking ship in my garden shed
Hotel in riverside clean-up
and, best of all:
NOT EVEN A ‘DENT’: Gordon’s car tax rise is a joke say Chelsea tractor haters.
I should mention at this juncture that this edition of the paper is technically the London Informer, covering the areas
of Hammersmith, Kensington and Westminster; there seem to be scores of local variations on the Informer title, and I know of at least one edition, the Richmond & Twickenham Informer, which also carried the Thoughtcat piece, albeit in a black & white and slightly reduced-size version which ends in mid-sentence, not even getting in the bitter remark about the Eurythmics, let alone Tone.
Perhaps the strangest thing about this whole episode is that it has taken some extracts from Thoughtcat to be reproduced in a “real” printed medium to make me see what the blog is really like – and, by extension, what I’m really like. The blog has been around, as I say, for over three years now, but this is the first time it’s seemed “real” to me – and I’m not sure I like all I see. Perhaps I saw myself as a bit more serious than my casual remarks might suggest. Then again, you can’t take blogging too seriously, can you?
There is, fairly obviously, no online version of the article, but clicking on the image above will open a JPEG which is more or less readable, while clicking here instead opens a better-quality PDF version. And if you can get your hands on a copy of the actual paper, hold on to this unique Thoughtcat collector’s item! It surely can’t be long before they start appearing on eBay.
Straw on Iran
“The idea of US nuclear attack on Iran is just nuts,” says Jack Straw in today’s Times. A conventional attack on the other hand…
Elsewhere he says, “We can’t be certain about Iran’s intentions and that is, therefore, not a basis on which anybody would gain authority to go for military action.” Funny – it didn’t stop you last time, Jack.
Publish and be ignored
A couple of years ago I entered the manuscript of my unpublished first novel All My Own Work into a competition run by two small UK publishing firms called Publish and be Damned (PABD) and UKA Press. I’d first heard of PABD through an article in the Guardian about publish-on-demand (POD; basically an affordable kind of vanity publishing) a few months before. The prize was several copies of your book “published” by PABD, to be offered for sale on their site as well as Amazon’s and UKA Press’s, and surrounding publicity. I recommended the contest to my mate Chris Bell, whose excellent and equally unpublished first novel Liquidambar had been unaccountably passed over by regular publishers. Both of our novels were shortlisted for the prize, and Chris’s went on to win.
Sadly the prize turned out to be incredibly disappointing, with production errors in the “finished” book, PABD and UKA Press doing very little by way of promotion, the title not turning up on Amazon for months and royalties and sales apparently unaccounted for. Chris is still, nearly two years later, embroiled in a dispute with PABD over all of this; PABD have now incidentally moved to Canada, as you might do if people were chasing you for money.
This would be bad enough, if perhaps predictable for the kind of smalltime, amateur outfits that PABD and UKA Press have sadly turned out to be. However, you might not expect almost as poor treatment at the hands of a national newspaper of the quality of The Guardian. Not long after Chris won the contest and received copies of his book, I offered to send one to the Guardian’s weekly books supplement, Guardian Review, on his behalf – not that I have any special contacts there, but the Review is based (like me) in the UK and Chris in New Zealand, and as mates we’d long agreed to do whatever we could to help promote each other’s books.
While PABD were not (and still aren’t) a regular publisher of the sort that the Review normally reviews, in May last year I’d noticed a new section in the supplement called Footnotes, apparently edited by ex-Bookseller supremo Nicholas Clee, which reviewed a selection of quality books from the small presses. This, combined with Chris’s newsworthy competition win and the Guardian’s own apparent interest in POD from their article that had brought PABD to our attention in the first place, made it seem reasonable to bring Liquidambar to Clee’s attention.
I wrote him a nice letter (in retrospect at two pages it was probably overlong, but I wanted to give him as much relevant information about Chris and the competition win as possible) and sent it with a copy of the book direct to Clee at the Guardian’s Farringdon, London address.
To be honest I’d guessed Clee’s most likely response would be a swift “thanks, but no thanks”, not because Chris’s book isn’t excellent but because he and the rest of the Review would no doubt be inundated with these sorts of author-attempts-at-getting-foot-in-door approaches. What I didn’t expect, though – however naievely – was to not get a response at all. When I’d heard nothing after two months I wrote Clee a much shorter letter reminding him of the book and asking again if he would consider it for the next Footnotes section.
By the end of September I’d still heard nothing from Clee, so as much as I hate going over people’s heads, it seemed a letter to the editor of the Review would be in order. Their name was not published anywhere in the Review or listed in the contacts section of the Guardian’s website, but it was given in my Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook (albeit the 2004 edition) and on Wikipedia as Annalena McAfee, a.k.a. Mrs Ian McEwan.
Guess what.
By November I’d still not heard anything at all from Clee, McAfee or anyone at the Review, so by now fuming at their total lack of any form of courtesy whatever – by now even a letter telling me to fuck off would have been better received – I decided to go right over all their heads and ask the Guardian’s editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger what was going on.
Funnily enough, this appeared to help.
Finally, just before Christmas, I received a reply, although not from Rusbridger or even McAfee, but the deputy editor of the Review, Georgina Henry, who firstly said McAfee had not been the correct person to write to, as she was not the “literary editor”. The fact that I had deliberately written to the editor-in-chief seemed to escape her, as had the tautology of there being a “literary editor” on the staff of a literary supplement. Nonetheless, she did say (for the record and anyone who cares) that said “literary editor” is Claire Armistead (note the spelling) and that (although she was apologetic) she was unable (or unwilling) to reconsider Liquidambar for review, saying their original decision not to review it should stand.
This letter to me was followed in January this year by another, this time from McAfee herself. I managed to control my excitement at receiving a letter from the wife of Ian McEwan, although this was quelled anyway by her comment “because of the large number of books coming in to the office we are unable to give feedback on individual submissions”. This is exactly what I’d thought would be their reaction in the first place – but how was I to know that if they didn’t tell me? If this is their official position, surely it might be a reasonably bright idea to photocopy it onto a few hundred sheets of Guardian headed paper, or (to be more eco-friendly about it) store it as a standard email, and just send one out to everyone who submits unsolicited books for review? I know the Guardian sends out unsigned, anonymous standard letters, because I’ve received three or four over the years from their “People Department” when I’ve been turned down for jobs at the paper. In fact, if the Guardian employed me to do nothing but send out these letters or emails, that might kill several birds with one stone.
McAfee then went on to say that it had been a further mistake to address the book to Nicholas Clee because “Nicholas writes for the Review on a freelance basis and is not involved in the commissioning of book reviews”. Apart from the fact that Clee had appeared to be “in charge” of the Footnotes section, and I was trying to avoid going round all the houses by sending Liquidambar direct to him, you might have thought that an organisation of the size of the Guardian could manage to get an envelope addressed to an important contributor, even a freelance one, to the man himself without too much trouble.
Finally McAfee said “can I suggest that any future books are submitted to our Literary Editor, Claire Armitstead [sic].”
McAfee obviously could do with someone to proof-read her letters before they go out (something else I could do around the office, perhaps!) as shortly after writing to me she also wrote to Chris, addressing his letter to “Auckland, Australia”.
I reckon all this should be a warning to an
yone wanting to get published: either be Ian McEwan, or be married to him, because everyone else may as well fuck off.
Chris’s own account of the whole sorry farce can be found here
Picture your life from Guardian Unlimited: News blog
The Grauniad reports on a trendy new magazine called Karen, which publishes nothing but arty photos of mundane tosh, and invites readers to contribute photos of the everyday from their sad lives. I of course joined in immediately with a pictorial account of a small but briefly terrifying adventure experienced by one of my ornamental cats, which can also be viewed here. The lucky winners of the contest will receive a free copy of the mag and may also have their photos published in it.
Profumo
I was surprised to see the death reported of Lord Profumo – I thought he’d died years ago. The reports all say the same thing, that whatever he’d achieved as an MP would be overshadowed by the “infamous sex scandal”. This is doubly sad, since not only did he seem on balance a decent bloke but the scandal purported not to be about the sex but about the fact that he’d lied to Parliament about the affair with Christine Keeler. This is bullshit, of course – politicians lie all the time and get away with it. What isn’t tolerated in the UK is politicians having sex. Frankly if more ministers for war (of which there are many, even if the post has now gone) spent their time screwing and less time making war the world would be a far nicer place.
