A good week

OK - so who are these children got up in fancy dress?

This week saw our 43rd wedding anniversary, which we celebrated with a trip up the Yorkshire Dales for the day and then on to my brother and sister-in-law near Kendal, for an evening meal. Lovely day - but impossible to believe that it’s the forty-third such. Only when you dig out (as I just did) an image from the past do you understand quite how remote 1966 has become - we were what we looked, in those far off days. Children.

But what a fantastic journey into maturity it has been, and in what company! Margaret and I have spent getting on for 16,000 days together now, and they just get better ...

Love, as I am fond of saying, is not something you fall in. It is something you make - hour by hour, day by day, year by year, crafting it and changing it and growing with it. Wonderful.

We took a bottle of Chateau les Rigalets 2002 with us to Kendal. “Cuvée exceptionnelle, sur des fruits noir, trés suave en bouche, rondeur et finesse caractéristique du Château les Rigalets,” says one reviewer. We’d go along with that. It was one of a hoard of six dozen assorted Cahors and Bergeracs we brought back from our last foray into the Lot valley, and it was a fitting wine with which to celebrate the passing of one more very good year. Not, perhaps quite in the same league as the 1966 Pomerol our family bought us for our 40th celebration, but pretty fine.

Wine and marriage seem good partners: the more you discover about them, the better they are.

Made it!

Well - after all the trails and tribulations I can finally say that my book The Edge of Things is fully published on sale, and available*. Amazon.com finally got to list it yesterday night. I find, in fact, that its true publication date was 9th July, but since it's extremely difficult to buy from the publisher, Xlibris, the effective date is when Amazon list it.
So this is the end of one very instructive and often tortuous journey, just getting the book published - and the start of another one - selling it!
In my experience people either are, or are not good at selling. Every school staffroom I ever worked in always had one or two characters (where are you now, Phil Addy?)** who could be relied on to sell anything to anyone - and half a hundred like me, who curled up in embarrassment at the very thought.
And this is odd, when you think about it: after all, writing a book is an act of enormous egotism - let alone publishing it. So why should selling it be so different? Is it a form of residual, British snobbery - the aristocracy's historic distaste for "trade"? Or is it just that, like any other form of mollusc, writers are braver inside their shells, than out? Anyway Here we go!

* http://www.amazon.com/Edge-Things-Alan-Robertshaw/dp/1441530835/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1249120479&sr=1-3

**Phil was a great teacher of Humanities who, as I recall, found selling so much more to his taste that he hung up his chalk and went off to manage a store in Paris: a life change I always marvelled at.