A Literary Lunch

A few weeks ago I received a mysterious phone call telling me that I’d come fourth in a competition I didn’t even remember entering: the Mail On Sunday novel competition. Not that I’d written a novel I’d forgotten about, just the first 150 (was it?) words. So on Monday I went to a ‘celebratory lunch’ in London with Sir John Mortimer and Fay Weldon - two of the judges - in attendance. I got there early, and nervously wandered the streets of Kensington, envisioning horrible social gaffes (‘Delighted to meet you, Sir Fay!’) before daring to enter Northcliffe House, home of the Mail. In spite of all the terrible things I’ve said about the paper in this blog, I have to admit that their offices are fantastic. I’d work there. Fuck that, I’d live there.

I met up with the other winners and we ‘progressed to a local restaurant’ as the explanatory letter I got put it. I don’t know what it was called but it wasn’t Pizza Hut. Fay and Sir John were there, waiting. I got pinned against the wall by Sir John’s wheelchair while the group photos were being taken, so no doubt my smile looks even more forced than usual. Throughout the meal I said little, merely absorbed surrounding conversations (and the fact that I wasn’t just fourth, I was joint fourth. With two others.) The girls from publishing joke-flirted with Sir John, while down the other end of the table, Fay talked entertainingly about Big Brother and porn. I liked Fay, whose books I used to read when I was in my late teens and early twenties. She seemed like a wise, kindly aunt. She was very encouraging, telling me that I should finish the novel ('finish' is putting it a bit lightly after 150 words, but still...) and even telling me to give up my job (well, in fact she just looked at me pointedly when I said how badly things were going at work, but still...) But still, the important thing is: I left on a high. I had one hundred and fifty pounds worth of book tokens in my pocket and sunny London lay ahead of me! The trick is… sustaining that feeling.

The guy who won that competition has won it before. He’s a veteran of beginning novels. After 150 words, he says, he’s played out. I at least have some kind of plan. But now, of course, I’m back at work, being swamped by other people’s output (Fay Weldon’s included). Battling against - I mean struggling to master - the new systems. My colleagues just look blankly at me when I tell them how Sir Fay Weldon proclaimed me 'England's greatest novelist'. They have other things to deal with. 'I'm generating a bank deposit', Paula, the assistant manager, said the other day, peering at her computer screen. ‘I thought you were sitting funny’, I quipped. Ah yes, there’s always my sitcom to fall back on.

Brentwood's premiere nitespot

Mat, Dave and I went to an album launch at the 'secret' (heavily signposted) nuclear bunker in Kelvedon Hatch. It all came about through Dave’s friend Dan, who knows the musicians, or knows people close to them, or is on some internet forum that has something to do with the band, who are called Redpoint. Huge and unremittingly drab, the place is impressive in an extremely depressing way, like being thrust back into a nightmare version of the past, or into some science fiction movie from the fifties. Every time you opened a door you expected to be attacked by a bad special effect. The gift shop featured rusting tins of ‘imitation flavour textured vegetable protein’ and souvenirs adorned with mushroom clouds. On the other hand there were teddy bears (with the correct number of limbs and eyes) and a solitary Get Well Soon card gathering dust on a shelf. Postcards depicted cardboard coffins and long empty corridors. Coasters proclaimed: ‘I’m addicted to totty!’ It was hard to separate the horror from the comic relief.

All in all, it was like a celebration of institutionalised awfulness. Imagine having to spend the rest of your days there with John Major (present in effigy form). It would be worse than my recurring nightmare of being trapped in Wilkinson’s. But you couldn’t fault it as a setting for gloomy electronic music. This was not a rave. Quite the reverse: the atmosphere was low-key, studious. Dummies in ill-fitting wigs (pretending to be post-holocaust PA’s), sat listening intently along with the assembled forum members. Whenever I lifted my hand to scratch an itch above my eye, I had the panicky feeling that they’d think I was putting my hand up to ask a question, and stop the music.

Which was ambient electronica with an alluring (to me, anyway) undertone of dread, the most impressive tracks being the ones least obviously indebted to Boards of Canada. You couldn’t exactly dance to it, but you could imagine your limbs twitching spasmodically to it as you slowly died of radiation poisoning. There were visuals too. I could only see a corner of the screen from where I was sitting, which made me feel appropriately alienated, though I think I got the gist: washed-out home movies, public information films, out-of-focus shots of telegraph poles, space. When it was over we fled into the night - Mat and Dave intent on that other institution of awfulness, Sam's.

books are heavy

Irritations continue to pile up at work, mainly in the form of boxes. Boxes that have to be unpacked. Boxes full of duplicate orders, or obscure customer orders automatically reordered by the system, which simply assumed that, just because we sold one copy of Invertebrates of the Norfolk Coast or Unlock Your Inner Sex Monkey, then it’s a must-have that’s going to fly off the shelves. The situation has got so out of hand that Gary the Parceline driver is complaining that he has ‘deliveries coming out of his arse’. Clearly this is not a healthy situation.

I even had to go in at seven the other day to shift crates of books out of the shop and into the waiting arms of a lone DHL driver. I was the best they could do in response to a call for some ‘muscle’. What do they think, that bookshops are staffed by steroid-fuelled Schwarzenegger clones growling their recommendations of the new Maeve Binchy? At least if they were it might discourage customers from coming in. They really don’t help matters. Especially this guy the other day who wanted to be rung when his order came in, but had issues with saying his mobile phone number out loud, in case someone else standing at the counter overheard. Even assuming that anyone would be interested enough in this man to whip out a little notebook and jot down his number, what then? They’re going to ring this guy up and say - what? 'Hey, aren't you that irritating guy from the bookshop? I just wanted to congratulate you on being such an arse.'

I’m seriously tempted to walk out, but into what? I could express my rage in song on X-Factor: I don’t seem to be any less talented than most of the contestants at this stage, although it clearly helps if you’ve suffered some terrible tragedy. The woman who’d broken her spine got through. So did the guy who’d lost his brother and father, although in this case his tragedy was offset by the fact that his girlfriend was pregnant: ‘pros and cons’, as he described it, a little cold-bloodedly, to the interviewer. Less fortunate was a ‘20-year old garage attendant’ (this would have made a great stage name) who was told by Simon Cowell that he would never win the competition ‘in a million years, even if you were the only one in it’. ‘My heart’s broken’, he sobbed afterwards. ‘Literally.’ Literally! A 20-year old garage attendant with his heart in actual pieces, banished from the entertainment industry for a million years! He is already a thousand times more interesting than whoever will win.

high concept

Monday Mat was over-excited about going to see Snakes On A Plane. Virtually everything he said was a variation on the title, inspired by whatever he happened to be doing, or looking at, at that particular moment. ‘Socks in a washing-machine!’ ‘Moths on a wall!’ I hoped that actually seeing the movie would calm him down and, after a while, it did. Not that he was disappointed. He could only have been disappointed by the movie (whose tagline should have read: Snakes! On a plane!) if it had not featured a plane with snakes on it. And it did. The villain came up with this novel method of assassinating a key witness after ‘exhausting every other option’. How many options do you have to exhaust before you end up with snakes on a plane? Ask Mat.

I was back at work this week. All the new systems are in, so we are forced to adjust to their little quirks. There do not seem to be quite as many wires as there were in Oxford Street. There, all the vital machinery is kept in the ‘EPOS room’, a space with the sacred air of a chapel, whose peace and quiet is interrupted only by staff kneeling down in front of the machines to replace back-up tapes (and give thanks if it feels appropriate). For some reason I was also reminded of Davros’ laboratory in Genesis of the Daleks, a Doctor Who episode of my youth. Though we have been threatened with uniforms, chips have not yet been implanted in our brains. Things would be easier if they had been.

In Sam’s on Saturday, Mat was dancing with such abandon that a girl asked him if he’d sell her pills. Briefly, he considered this as a career option ('Pills on a dancefloor!'), until I pointed out that his inability to talk to strangers might effectively rule this out. He would only be able to sell to friends and family, and he’d never do that because he ‘doesn’t approve’ of ecstasy use. I was reminded of this on a visit home today when my seventy-nine year old aunt said: ‘I could do with some e’s’. We were playing scrabble.