Idle Tom excels himself at Eton
Off to Eton on Wednesday to flog The Well-Tempered Clavier. It was absolutely pouring.
Idle Tom the Publisher running around like a headless monkey, squawking that his books were going to get wet.
Which they did.
Very.
"Tom," I said. "Thanks for getting all these books down here. Very much appreciated."
"Not a problem," he said, in his natty brown pinstripe suit which was sopping after ten minutes.
"But there’s something not quite right about them."
"They look all right to me."
"What about the cover?"
"You’re not still harking on about the cover!"
"You absolutely promised me that you were going to get some stickers made up, black on yellow, with that great quote from Alexander McCall Smith -"
"And so I did!" he said. All petulant. "And so I did!"
I spoke softly, as if speaking to my elder son Dexter. "I’m sure you did, Tommy. But just one question - where the hell, then, are the stickers?"
"Ohh! The stickers!" he said. "Well they didn’t arrive in time, that’s what happened. Probably arrived at my home this morning."
"Really? No pork pies? You really ordered the stickers?"
"Of course I did!"
* Although we didn’t have Mr McCall Smith’s charming quote to cover up the detestable cover, we still notched up a rave review in the school mag, The Chronicle … which helped us shift a ton of books.
Some of Michael Meredith’s kindlier quotes …
"The bare plot does not convey the excellence of the book …
"The Well-Tempered Clavier deserves a place in the pantheon of the best Eton novels. Its fast-moving love story is exciting, and the Eton background utterly convincing showing how much the school has changed since 1982.
"It is the ideal book to take on holiday. Go out and buy a copy: Then read it, with Rosalyn Tureck playing a Bach accompaminment through your head-phones."
Handsome!