Miscalculation - Don't Trust Me With Quantities

It is a long time since we had a new bathroom installed. Years have passed and it’s ready for doing again but we keep putting it off with all the ‘are we moving, are we staying’ discussions. Whether we upgrade or not, I’m keeping out of it. Last time, when the plumber completed the installation, the tiler came to measure up. I knew exactly what I wanted and where to order them from, so off I went to the tile shop with the information safely in my head. The tiler, very busy and in demand, booked us in on schedule with the tiles arrival and all went according to plan, until, when setting everything out, he wondered if there was a box missing. There were not enough tiles to complete. He measured the walls again and checked his square metre calculations. Oops. I could feel the blush of my embarrassment as I had to tell him I’d ordered the quantity in square yards. Completely my fault, no miscalculation, just an honest mistake, but he was disappointed that he wouldn’t finish the job on time and I felt stupid. More tiles were ordered. We had to wait ages for the tiler to fit us in again – it was only a small area to finish off and I began to think he was making us wait on purpose – all my fault. Don’t trust me with anything important like measurements, ordering and quantity surveying. I’m only really good for colour co-ordinating and knitting.

I expect lots of us as younger individuals still living with parents have run out of money before the next pay day comes round, or maybe that was just me. At seventeen I was the proud owner of an Austin A40. I spent my last pound on a couple of gallons of three star petrol to last me the week, perhaps a bit more, then I’d get my wages. I had been driving to work and back in town and a bit of visiting friends, nothing of any distance.  A few days later, I’d stopped not far from home and couldn’t get the car started again. I did what I’d been told to do and what anyone on their own should do, that’s find the nearest phone box and call Dad. Mobile phones were in the future. Dad listened to my description of the car’s symptoms. The ticking sound on the ignition meant it was out of petrol. He would bring me some. He knew I didn’t have money for a day or two. Bless him. Of course the petrol gauge was on zero, but it often was and I was sure it would last the week, a complete miscalculation. Dad’s words of advice which I followed from then on, was not to allow the petrol tank to run so low, otherwise sediment can get sucked up and cause problems. This might not apply to modern cars, I’m going back fifty years.

A few Haikus:

The diff’rence between
Square metres and yards,
Miscalculation.

When wages are spent
And it’s nowhere near pay day,
Miscalculation.

Austin A 40
Economical first car
That ran on fresh air.

Thanks for reading, Pam x

Read More

UK best sellers. We're all doomed.

If I was going to put a new book out, I might consider finding a celebrity endorsement for it, a snappy picture or a cluster of key words to bring it to the attention of google. I might make the cover yellow, I might make it something gritty, something an audience can relate to- a tale of childhood and abuse (true to life, obviously), neglect or perhaps even abduction.

I won’t be doing any of these things.

I doubt I will ever be a best-selling author. If I wrote something and decided to publish it, I would hope it would be done on merit and not on the sheer need to sell someone some drivel with a ‘look at me, I was beaten’ slant to it. Sadly, I think this pretty much counts me out of the bestselling book market. I’ll point out here that if Blackpool’s branch of Waterstones closed, the residents of this town would be left to choose their books primarily from the shelves of ASDA and TESCO- the future doesn’t look great, I must admit.

The blog theme this week is a slightly contentious one, I’m afraid- we’re going with “Literary vs Commercial Fiction”. I have an opinion on this, as do all of you readers I am sure. Is it my place to tell someone what to read? Is it my place to tell someone to put the bloody ‘based on true events’ book down and read something valuable? Is it even my place to rant on about the lack of appealing fiction on the shelves and my sense of despair in passing an oversized ‘Biography/Autobiography/Celebrity Fiction/’Based on a true story’ section.  Readers of this stuff- you have your opinions. I’ll agree to hate you for them.

In terms of poetry, I am not quite sure where this theme points me. For a long time I’ve been harping on about what is probably deemed ‘commercial’ as opposed to ‘literary’ stuff. Performance poets are snappy, direct and deliver passion that is hard to deny but, on the page, it often doesn’t work. Go the other way and have a look at more ‘page’ poets and perhaps they are held back by a lack of performability. It is hard to attract an audience with these poems and yet, they are often the poets we cling on to the most. As with the fiction, I think being current helps. There are trends to follow and whilst right now books about being beaten and battered in foster homes romances ending with disease are great, I suspect lots of them will fall by the wayside when you look back over the years, do we want our poems doing this.

I will finish here by just giving you readers a point to consider. Last year 35% of books that graced the fiction chart were published before 2010, meaning we are actually re-reading the older stuff, the stuff that has been hanging around, loved and recommended. Movie books, celebrity chefs and tales from the pens of cultural ‘icons’ will keep regenerating, of course, but with the likes of Dickens and Jane Austen proving ever more popular amongst readers, maybe the trick is to buy the books that can stand the test of time, not just shout for a week or two. I caught a reading by Lynton Kwesi Johnson earlier this year- a poet I have admired since studying his work some years ago- and afterwards was left thinking something was missing. There was no delivery, no punch to it and, after years of Black rights not being a massive issue in the UK media, I felt the poems were almost left behind with the time. These are good poems that rely heavily on delivery and if I have learnt anything for my own writing from the experience, it is that I never want to be a performance poet past his peak, much rather a page poet trying to find his feet. I hope to have a new poem up for next week, until then, keep writing. 

Thanks for reading, S.  

Read More