Booknerds are worse than smartphone zombies
SIR – I have been interested in the recent correspondence about the menace of people reading books while walking along the street, becoming so engrossed that they bump into each other – or into us innocent passers-by. In my experience, it is the fiction addicts who are the worst. The other day, I was walking to work, checking my text messages in the usual way, when some idiot, deep in Barchester Towers, barged into me, nearly knocking my phone from my hand. (Occasionally, the collision of a couple of booknerds can be quite funny – like the pile-up I witnessed when Bridget
Jones crashed head-on with Oliver Twist.)
Non-fiction freaks can also be a problem. I’ve seen a man so enslaved by a biography of Napoleon that mothers with buggies were forced to swerve and, on one appalling occasion I watched as someone distracted by William Hague’s life of William Pitt seriously inconvenienced a small child on a micro-scooter. (The irony that it was William Pitt the Younger impeding a youngster was lost on him, of course.)
They have no shame about reading books on trains, so the rest of us can hardly concentrate on our Instagrams because of the racket of all that pageturning. And of course they go on and on about their latest acquisition. Some woman gets an upgrade on her William Boyd and is desperate to demonstrate amazing features of his latest novel, like the clever characterisation, the ingenious plotting and the brilliant descriptive passages. Yawn, yawn. Have you seen these people? They actually stroke their new book. And sometimes they even sniff it!
The trouble is, they miss so much of life. You see them in the local library with their noses stuck in some volume, ignoring the vibrant life all around them – the gossip, the Pilates classes and kids’ drama groups. It’s sad really. Yours faithfully, Steve Apps
Over a rather bad meal in a hotel last week, I noticed that the menu featured both heritage potatoes and heirloom tomatoes. Just as most thoroughbred racehorses are descended from one Arab stallion brought into this country in 1706, these heritage potatoes can probably trace their ancestry back as far as Sir Walter Raleigh’s pioneering spud. And soon tomatoes will be trying to tell us that their family came over with William the Conqueror. It’s not just humans who are researching their ancestry; now fruit and veg are at it as well.
It may well be that the cauliflower you ate last night was a raging snob, disdainful of all the other Johnnycome-lately cauliflowers in the greengrocer’s display. You can also get heirloom carrots, very conscious that they come from a long line of carrots. I’m keeping an eye out for heiress celery or even a titled turnip. And I’m sure, if you asked nicely, the College of Arms would knock you up a coat of arms for your purple sprouting broccoli.
It’s not just vegetables that go way back. I believe that menu-writing is an art that is handed down from father to son, or mother to daughter, over many generations. “Never forget, son,” says the grizzled old menu maestro on his deathbed, “that all fish is sustainable and all bread is artisan – unless it’s rustic.” And the granny dandling the little child on her knee coos: “You’ll never go wrong, dear, if you remember that everything is ethical, locally sourced and farmhouse fresh. And may all your chips be hand-cut.”
All you need is a forum – preferably a world forum. Seminars and dinners are OK and conferences pay well, but the bigmoney public speakers will always go for a forum. The other thing you need is a warning. If you are addressing a forum, you must say that things cannot go on the way they are. A dire warning is good, but a grim one or a stark one will earn extra dollars. Ideally, you should identify a global crisis that no other lecturer has spotted.
It was revealed last week that George Osborne has been signed up by the Washington Speakers Bureau, which also has Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, among many others, on its books. So now he joins the lucrative dire warnings industry.
I also plan to get into the business. And I’ve already selected my global crisis. My message will be that the forum circuit is in danger of becoming so overloaded that it is about to blow a fuse. The fatal combination of too many ex-statesmen chasing too few speakers’ slots, coinciding with a glut of stark predictions, could bring the whole edifice down. The situation is dire. Thank goodness.