Eating my words

At this time of lockdown when lots of my work has, as they say, fallen off a cliff, I decided to ransack my memory and see if any of the writing-based money-making schemes I’ve come up with over the years might be revived to help me earn a bob or two. Having trawled them from my mind’s depths and examined them in detail, I can safely say that I won’t be buying the island next to Richard Branson’s just yet.

The first idea, from sometime in the mid-1980s, was

The Edible Line of Poetry. The idea came to me when I was running a writing workshop in a library and somebody had baked some scones for us to chomp on in the tea break. They were all laid out in a row along a table and suddenly I thought that you could write a word on each of ten scones so that you made a line of poetry. To use a well-known example, you could write ‘‘I wandered lonely as a cloud that walked on high’’ in icing on top of the scones, a word at a time, and then as you ate them the line would, to use a literary term, get redrafted.

Then, after the workshop on the bus on the way home, I had a brainwave: what if the line of poems would carry on making sense even as the scones got eaten? How about if I could devise a line that made sense backwards and forwards so that as you ate the scones from each end it would still make sense? Bakers would fall over themselves to make them. Genius! And I’d get to eat the scones!

As ever with this kind of idea the devil is in the detail and try as I might I couldn’t come up with a line that worked. I tried The Tastier The Scone The Tastier Tasty Taste, which, if you ate one scone at a time, went through Tastier The Scone The Tastier Tasty via The Scone The Tastier, ending up at Scone The. Back to the drawing board! Mind you, I still think it’s a good idea if I could only think of a good line. Any suggestions? We can go halves on that island.

There were so many other ideas in those days; me and my mate John Turner came up with a wheeze we called

The Poetry Waiters where people could order a poem with their meal in a restaurant. We even had letterheads done, but there were no takers. I was going to make a living by entering slogan competitions because I figured that, as a writer, I was good with words and I’d be able to come up with enough winning lines to keep me in comfort for the rest of my life. I subscribed to a newsletter that kept me informed of the closing dates and the rules of dozens of these competitions each month and I got to work. I entered hundreds of them and I won nothing. No, I tell a lie: I won 50 Superman Lunch bags once and I gave them to the kids to take their sandwiches to school in.

I reckon I’ll revive The Poetry Waiters. Oh, I can’t: all the restaurants are shut!