chuzzlewit flats

Waterloo Road: New Term, announces the TV Times. Not for us though, as we are soon to leave Waterloo Road forever. Funny, that series was just starting when we moved here last year (I never watched it). There is no series called Copperfield Gardens in the offing, though perhaps I could try and pitch it to the BBC, since Waterloo Road has obviously been such a success. What would it be about though? Copperfield Gardens sounds classier than Waterloo Road… so I don’t think it’s going to be reality TV. Sounds quite Dickensian actually. Thieves, murderers, poverty: can’t wait.

During the operation to clean out the garden before the real owners move back in here, Chad uncovered a dead magpie. Well, he didn’t actually uncover it, it was lying beak up in a pool of water in one of our garden chairs, only we didn’t notice. Being superstitious about magpies I find myself struggling to interpret this omen. One for sorrow, yes, but does the fact of it being dead mean worse sorrow? Or the end of all sorrow, forever? And what about the weather? Is that an omen? Last night the wind was swooping around the garden like something from an Al Gore movie; further horrible extremes are predicted.

At work, as at home, I am putting books into boxes. Well I wouldn’t have it any other way. But there are times when you almost get a bit bored with putting books into boxes. There’s only so much fun you can have with a tape gun. And there are - at work, at least - so many books. Phoenix, our super-sophisticated computer system, is best likened, I have decided, to one of those machines you play tennis against, only instead of firing balls at you it fires books, so rapidly and relentlessly that you cannot respond to it in any sensible way. You can’t sell them all, can’t return them all: eventually they collapse on top of you. If there is no blog next week, you’ll know why.

It’s because we’ve moved to a place where they’ve yet to discover the internet.

The Bookseller

‘Give the book to the lady’, said the mother to her little girl as they approached the counter. Now Paul and I may not be the most impressive specimens of manliness the world, or even Brentwood, has ever seen, but we are pretty obviously male, and we were the only human beings of any sex available at the counter at that particular time, so where had this ‘lady’ come from? Even if I was a woman I wouldn’t be a lady, I’d be a right old slapper, or so I like to think; I’m sure Paul would be the same.

Customers, that’s the problem. The other day when I explained to some guy who wanted to order a book that it was Waterstones’ policy to take the full payment for orders up front, he said: ‘Well, it’s my policy not to pay up front, so now what are you going to do?’ Well, what indeed? Beat you over the head with the procedures manual? As it happened, he said it in a jokey way, but I was still left at a loss. Really shoppers should be given guidelines on how to act in stores, and one of the key guidelines should be: don’t make jokes. Not unless your material is very, very good. I’m not paid to feign hilarity. Am I?

I served someone who wanted to pre-order the next Harry Potter. ‘Don’t be ridiculous’, I implied beneath whatever it was I actually said. ‘They haven’t even told us the publication date yet!’ Then I went on my break and read in trade magazine The Bookseller that in fact Waterstone’s are taking pre-orders for the next Harry Potter. And I looked over to my left, and there lay some posters advertising the fact. Apparently your three pounds is refunded if it doesn’t come in by Christmas. It’s almost like they’re getting people to sponsor her. She’s almost reached the end. All she needs is a few more million!

Well anyway it goes to show how much I know about bookselling, or indeed my immediate surroundings. I would never have thought anyone would be insane enough to reserve a book that doesn’t yet exist and that, when it does, will be available practically everywhere, often at a far cheaper price than Waterstone’s could do it for. But - the posters having now gone up - we have had several. Wonder if they’ll pay a deposit on my forthcoming novel? I haven’t written it yet, don’t know when or if it’ll ever be finished, but if you like Harry Potter... you’re going to love throwing money away on me too.

negentropic

If my New Year’s resolutions were to sleep badly and watch more Eastenders, then 2007 is well on course. I am subject to spells of sleeplessness, even when Hannah isn’t ringing the doorbell at three in the morning. I lie there. Sleep stands at the foot of the bed, stony-faced, eyeing me judgementally and refusing to approach. In the morning I feel like a chalk drawing of myself.

Hey, how do you like that imagery? I am reading a book about writing (called About Writing) by everyone’s favourite black gay and massively-bearded science fiction writer Samuel R. Delany. Fascinating as it is, it isn’t the kind of guide that tells you that whoever you are, you can write a novel. It’s more like: don’t even pick up your pen unless you know you represent a significant improvement on Shakespeare. Sample quote: ‘You must write to project yourself, again and again, through the annealing moment that provides the negentropic organization which makes a few texts privileged tools of perception.’

From now on this will be my motto.

I went back home to Ingrave to catch up with the latest teenage craze in the Mail On Sunday (dancing on the roofs of moving driverless cars) and to keep abreast of the latest village gossip (as a festive touch, the new vicar put a red light in his porch, which some thought inappropriate). My other home - the one in which I do actually live - is on the move. Soon we will be in Copperfield Gardens, an area which has variously been described as a haunt of drug fiends and ‘relatively quiet’. Of course there isn’t necessarily any contradiction between those statements. It may be quiet because everyone’s on horse tranquillisers.

christmas new year double issue

Mat got an application from some young woman at Barking College wanting to do work experience in his company. Her ambition is to be a high-powered businesswoman; imagine her face when she arrives at ‘Redstudio’ and discovers that she’s sharing a bed with Mat. Her only previous experience is in a hairdresser’s, where she learned to ‘shampoo, condition and neutralise hair’. Neutralise! I’m sure this is a perfectly proper use of the word, its just my mind that comes up with images of perms gone so wrong that only napalm can deal with them.

In a break with tradition, we enjoyed Christmas dinner at Bobs’ and Justin’s. In their bedroom, in fact (suitably rearranged). It’s a small flat, and soon to be smaller, because they had news: Saskia is to have a sibling; also, my parents are to become grandparents; and in addition, I am to be an uncle. In July. I don’t feel ready for it. They might have discussed it with me - still I tendered, and still tender, my congratulations.

Later that evening we went to Bobs’ sister’s place. It was the usual chaotic scene. The garden was ankle deep in soap suds from a snow machine perched above the kitchen door. Sally Ann, Bobs’ sister, was trolleyed and trying to get kids to play with her in the ‘snow’; a couple of small children were inching politely away. Later, she got Chad, her brother, out there: I vividly remember seeing him flying past with Sally Ann directly behind him, her hand down the back of his jeans, grabbing his underwear. ‘This is disturbing!’, was his cry.

New Year produced similarly excessive scenes. We were in the wilds of Suffolk, in cottages. A dead rabbit greeted us on our arrival, positioned feet away from an apparently deserted hutch. We were then greeted (more literally) by an impossibly nice woman, who showed us round. Too nice, Dave thought, though only the casual admission that she was ‘forced’ to give up smoking offered any hint of rural nastiness.

My New Year’s resolution is never to drink black absinthe again. I only had to have one glass and I immediately felt sick and fell also into a kind of dazed stupor in which it was possible only to stumble around taking photographs. (Or so I thought. In fact, as other people’s photographs show, I danced - at the very least - and, according to eyewitness reports, looked as though I was enjoying myself, which is nice to know.)

By the time I had more or less recovered half the assembled had gone to bed and most of the other half were stripped to their underwear and indulging in mock-lascivious activities, while Phil, Vicki and I looked on, feeling like the audience for a Channel 5 ‘documentary’. Or possibly Channel 4, since Chad, at the far reaches of drunkenness, had unaccountably turned into Russell Brand - a personality transplant that his body rejected not long after, with unfortunate consequences for the kitchen floor in Amanda and Mat’s cottage.

Things calmed down somewhat after that. We watched Seabiscuit (with Meryl Streep very good in the title role) and then Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. The Child Catcher is less frightening than the children, with their perfect enunciation and unfailing optimism, though no doubt this is just the attitude to get us through 2007.