The Spectator.co.uk Susan Hill Blog

Channel Description:

Latest Articles in this Channel:

10/11/10--05:26: Not signing (chan 1705634)

Better get a couple of things straight. No, I do not have a down on all second-hand book dealers and yes, I do know people are only trying to make a living. Just as I am. But after years of putting up with it, yesterday I reached the end of my rope and exploded, not only on my own behalf but on behalf of both sellers of new books and of any other author who feels as I do and wants to be spoken up for.

Yesterday, I did the second of a bunch of events at the oldest English literary Festival of them all, at Cheltenham. It has changed since I first started doing events there some 35 years ago. It has grown in size by a factor of several hundred and it has, more recently, become a bit impersonal and corporate. I don`t want someone thrusting a glass of free ‘sponsors’ whisky into my face every time I walk from  A to B, like the perfume girls in Selfridges, and I don`t want to fight my way to the book stall through a sea of ‘Coffee X tent’ and ‘Bank Y’ venue.  But I appreciate


10/19/10--11:04: Behaving well, behaving badly (chan 1705634)

Fame turns people’s heads, and some only need a tiny taste of it for theirs to swivel all the way round.

I have been quiet on the blog front because I have spent the past two weeks bobbing in and out of the Cheltenham Festival of Literature doing stuff, and while I was there I spent plenty of time in the Green Room, waiting for a fellow speaker, waiting to be called by the floor manager, waiting to go home. Such time is never wasted, because there is always food and drink, books and newspapers and an old friend often turns up. But these are also golden occasions to catch up on one’s people-watching in general and celeb and writer-watching in particular. A friend once said she walked into the – much smaller – green room at the Hay Festival and found it "crackling with male ego" and that was wondrously true of Cheltenham too. The male ego manifests itself in the way he walks, the way he glances round, the way he treats his Publicity girl/make-up girl/floor manager – and par excellence, his fellow writers. One I met this time behaved


10/23/10--10:49: Proud to work (chan 1705634)

I do wonder if the knee-jerk lefties whose hearts are bleeding for the poor after the cuts have ever actually met a genuinely poor person outside of the Third World. A friend who works for the NHS in the community would like to take a bus load of them round her patch in the rural West Country and see how many they find. She knows all about the genuine poor, usually those on low rural wages, or pensioners, and she knows about the rest. She meets plenty on long-term sick benefits, who have nothing wrong with them and she blames the GPs for giving in to threats. ‘My mates’ll be round if you don`t give me a sickie, we know where you live Doc.’ They do and they would, make no mistake. The doctor should report them to the police? Well, yes, but whose word would it be against?

If you want to get onto long term invalidity benefits you have a bad back, stress and depression, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, ME, or panic attacks – in other words, anything really difficult to diagnose for certain.(I know those can also be genuine complaints, by the way.) No good


11/05/10--02:46: Charidee (chan 1705634)

A journalist once asked me a football-related question and added ‘in the unlikely event of your being interested in football.’ I said I was a 50-year Manchester United supporter, to which he replied ‘That doesn't count. They’re an easy team to support. You should try being a Bolton Wanderers fan.’

I took his point, even if there are far more disheartening examples than Bolton Wanderers. (Try Norwich.)  

And as with football, so with charities. Some are ‘easy to support.’  Before I proceed, and for the benefit of the few who do not actually read what I write here but still pass abusive comment, I am absolutely not saying that any charity I mention is unworthy of support or that any diseases mentioned are easy ones from which to suffer.

Right.

Some charities are Man United charities – easy to support. They are high-profile, a lot of people are involved, they get a lot of publicity. Every established charity, great and small, dreads a major international disaster and the subsequent appeal, not only for the obvious reasons, but because after a tsunami, an earthquake, a massive flood, there is a global


11/13/10--07:21: Charidee, Part 2 (chan 1705634)

I had not intended to write any more on this subject for now but then events, events….

That class act James Delingpole has a very fine piece in the magazine this week about the dire state of the economy, need for even more swingeing cuts than Cameron and Osbourne would dare to make, etc. I`m sure James is right, as he often is, though he cries Doom Doom and I'm still waiting for the Doom that was going to befall us two years ago during the banking crisis. Doom just never comes, somehow.

But I digress. Well, a bit. Cuts there are, and some would cut every front line service they provide to the bone before they would disturb themselves in their own cosy jobs – so some have started by cutting grants to organisations that do great good.

As the state moves away from propping everything and everybody up, so the private individual is required to take up the slack. Hence today came two very worthwhile charities appealing directly to me, one of which is in danger of  imminent closure and this is only the first hint


11/26/10--02:46: Would you miss it? (chan 1705634)

There used to be an excellent small bookshop in the Cotswold market town near to where I live but after the previous owner retired it went downhill fast and finally closed last June. The shop stood dark and empty and looked like a black tooth in an otherwise full mouth of sparkling teeth.

A couple of weeks ago, two friends who already run a successful bookshop in Oxfordshire, and I re-opened it and we are off to a flying start in defiance of  the doom and gloom on the High Street in general and the book trade in particular. So many people have come in to wish us well and to tell us how they missed a bookshop. ‘It was like a hearth without a fire’ one said. We have been so warmly welcomed – though ‘use it or lose it again’ has to be our motto.

But the whole experience made me ask myself what else I would miss – not shops, though heaven knows our Post Office would head that list – but lots of other everyday things we assume are there forever. So I’ve made a little list.

Do chip


12/18/10--06:34: The games people play (chan 1705634)

Shall we forget the weather? Shall we not use the S word? Shall we forget the fact that I have been a rubbish Spectator Blogger recently? Good, that’s settled then. I do have reasons aka excuses for my temporary absence but I won`t bother to run them past you. The weather has no excuse though, absolutely none. I mean, this nonsense started in November, and it still isn`t even Christmas and it’s sn….

Sorry. We don`t mention the weather.

All the same, if you have been, shall we say, inconvenienced by certain external factors and are unable to get out, I have some fun for you. I decided against adding my two pennyworth on the subject of tuition fees, student protests/riots, or the Wikileaks. You don`t need them. You can do down the Cat and Fiddle and hear anyone who is as competent as I am to spout about all that, spouting.

What I want to talk to you about is games. Not as in sport, not egames or computer games or tv games or things that do not deserve to be graced with the name of Games. I mean Board Games. There


12/22/10--10:35: Manbookering (chan 1705634)

We were reminded very seriously at the first meeting of judges for 2011 that what everyone calls the Booker Prize - always has, always will - is in fact the Man Booker so I must practice, writing it, if not saying it. Right, here we go. 
(Clears throat.)
The Man Booker Prize. 

The meeting was an informal ‘getting to know you’ one over a pleasant lunch in London’s Charlotte Street. The food was good and the waiter announced that in addition to the printed dessert menu, there was Christmas Pudding. Everyone had shaken their heads at pudding in favour of the usual coffee or mint tea, which always depresses me, because I am a pudding person but outside of home I rarely get to eat it. I defy anyone to sit munching on Eton Mess or Toffee crème brulee or even a fruit salad, when the others are watching in smug disapproval while sipping a sugarfree espresso. But I was sitting next to Matthew d’Ancona, late of this parish, and Mirabile Dictu, I heard him ordering the Christmas pudding so hastily asked if I could have a taste when it came. Gallantly,


01/10/11--14:20: Four words (chan 1705634)

In context, you understand, I never want to read them all together ever again. Ever. The words are: Locally. Sourced. Seasonal. Produce.

I will of course because they’re everywhere, I’m amazed they don’t have them a mile high on McDonalds menus. In fact, they may well do so – only I wouldn`t know because I haven’t been into a McDs since my children were small and had Ronald McDonald Birthday parties.

Years ago, a friend who was married to a clergyman - Canon Residentiary of a Cathedral, no less - decided it was time he saw something of The World. So she took him with her to their local Sainsbury. This was a man who had not been into any form of shop since his Cambridge days when he bought his pipe tobacco from the one on the corner, and had never ever entered any supermarket. He stood stock still in the fruit and vegetable aisle – which was nothing like as large and extensive as it would be today – and gazed around him in silent wonder. Then he said ‘This is amazing. This is wonderful. Just look at God’s bounty!


02/02/11--07:04: Private or what? (chan 1705634)

As not everyone knows how the new social media works, let me try and explain briefly before I continue. When you join Twitter, you choose to follow others and so read their posts (or Tweets). In turn, others do the same to you. There is also a facility called a Retweet which is much used either for sending round good jokes or, more sensibly, for networking or passing on useful information and for marketing. So anyone using Twitter is, or certainly ought to be, aware that is a public medium and accepted to be so. People can re-tweet something I say with my tacit permission, so if I say something stupid, and it goes global, the fault is entirely mine.

Facebook is different. If I want to read the posts and subsequent comments, on someone else’s page, I have to ask – I send a message requesting that they accept me as a Friend. If they refuse, that’s that. I can’t argue, and I can’t read what they write.

Now some people, foolishly in my view, accept absolutely anyone as a Friend. This is fine if you only have public-style conversations – perhaps you’re hoping