The Well-Tempered Clavier

I have a friend, Maguire. One of those sorts of guys who thinks the very best of everyone they meet. Who loves nothing more than picking up little birds with broken wings and nurturing them back to good health. Who sees a stray dog wandering down the street and wants nothing more than to adopt it.

And who, in the past week, has taken up the cudgels on behalf of that other defenceless fledgling, Idle Tom the publisher.

Even accused me of churlishness in one of his blog comments:

"You seem to rather have it in for poor Tom.
It’s odd that you’ve never mentioned that he’s variously 
Shortlisted for UK Young Publisher of the Year 2007
Shortlisted for UK Young Entrepreneur of the Year 2007 and
Longlisted for Enterprising Young Brit Award 2007
A little ungenerous of you?"

Later on, Maguire called up to chide me in person over what may possibly have been perceived as a lack of charity on my part as regards Idle Tom.

"Tom’s been listed for all these awards, and you haven’t mentioned them," said Squire Maguire. "Not once. Now is that nice?"

"I certainly have mentioned them!" I rounded on the man. "I said he was up for juvenile publisher of the year and young entrepreneur of the year (teenage category)."

"Poor Tom," he said, and I could almost feel his pain as the tears started stinging at his eyes. "I thought better of you."

"What do you mean, Maguire? He loves this stuff! For Idle Tom, the only thing that’s worse than being written about is not being written about!"

"But I can sense he has feelings -"

"All right, you know what I’m going to do - just for you?"

Tim sighs - the sigh of the damned. "What?"

"I won’t call him Idle Tom any more."

Tim perked up at that. "Well that’s nice. That’s a start."

"Yep! Certainly is! No, just for you, Timmy, I will in future refer to my publisher as "Poor Idle Tom".

This entry was posted on Friday, November 30th, 2007 at 9:00 am and is filed under Well-Tempered Clavier. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.