Idle Tom and his pork pies
To Stockton last night, to spread the good news that … ahem … that there’s a heart-warming love story out there that’s been written by a reformed toff. (Or some such. I’ve forgotten what this week’s selling mantra is from Idle Tom the Publisher.)
Yes indeed, Stockton was fantastic. It constantly amazes me that people turn out of an evening to listen to a no-name author such as myself.
One mildly discombobulating fact though …
The books - surprisingly - HAD turned up.
I think they’d arrived about two hours before I did.
There was the usual discussion about the awful cover. So many people saying that if they’d seen the book in a shop, they wouldn’t have touched it.
Of slightly more concern, however, was the fact that none of the books had any of these "amazing" stickers that Tom’s had printed up. (These are stickers with a lovely quote from Alexander McCall Smith. More importantly, though, they are an attempt to blot out Tom’s dire cover.)
So I called up Idle Tom to find out what had happened to the stickers …
"Oh hi Bill." I could hear Tom scrunching on some toast. "Stockton okay?"
"Yeah, Tommy, Stockton was great. But what I wanted to know is what’s happened to all those stickers that you were going to put on the front cover?"
"Oh yeah, the stickers, yeah, there’s been a bit of a delay at the production plant, but we should have them some time next week."
"Some time next week??"
"Yeah - shouldn’t be a problem should it?"
"But you told me that you’d already RECEIVED the stickers a week ago. You said they’d been delivered to the wrong address, and that they were waiting for you at home -"
More scrunching of toast. "Did I??"
"Are you speaking with forked tongue?"
"Well I couldn’t have told you that they’d been delivered to my home address because they were never delivered there."
"That doesn’t quite follow, Tom. I mean there is the other possibility that you’ve been telling pork pies in order to shut me up -"
"I do not tell pork pies! I hate pork pies!"
"Methinks he doth protest too much -"