On the shelf - or not?
Went into the Waterstones at London Wall for a last-minute gift to find everyone fighting over Michael McIntyre, and Gok Wan, and One Day, and Jamie Oliver, and the memoirs of a Meerkat: my publisher is based a few metres down the same street but neither of mine are even in store. Could have cried.
On flashing my “Society of Authors” card in the hope of a rebate, the sales assistant joked I should pay more, as an author, not less; I laughed too, non-existent sales figures dancing before my eyes. Believe me, mate, I’ve paid, and continue to pay, for no apparent reward.
Later, I take a train out of Liverpool Street to visit my grandparents. The slush refuses to melt: just gets greyer, black almost, an icy nuisance. Hackney Marshes are monochrome, each small pond a frozen bas-relief of gnarled, stunted branches. Since reading “The Road” I can’t look at snow the same way; it has become sinister, a precursor of death.
Leave Frankie alone!
I’m sure I’d feel different if I had disabled kids, or was being personally targeted for abuse, but I’ve never read such sanctimonious bullshit as that being churned out about Frankie Boyle. He was funny in “Mock the Week”; mostly his sketches are unwatchably awful. That’s his only crime: some of his jokes just aren’t funny. But is it his duty to speak out on behalf of the mentally ill, the disabled, the lost? No. His only duty is to make us laugh. Let him get on with it. When Nestle and L’Oreal claim to be our moral arbiters we're in big trouble...
Enough from me. Ho ho ho. Merry Christmas folks...
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