The Queen's Perk or How to Meet (almost) Anyone
posted by Barter Books @ 2:50pm, Sunday 12 July 2009.
The perk I have always most envied the Queen - I mean, beyond Her Majesty’s nice collection of tiaras (among which I have my favourites, o yes) - is the fact that she can meet and talk with, for however long, anyone in this whole world she wants to.
Imagine!
Nelson Mandela? No problem. The Dalai Lama? Done. Tom Stoppard? Tina Turner? Alec Baldwin? (Yeah, Alec Baldwin!) Or, for that matter, anyone who has ever contributed anything whatsoever to The New Yorker? Piece of cake!
In this way, actually meeting them, all these people would become - even as they must, surely, to the Queen, herself - just that, people. Or, anyway, not just photographs in the papers, images on TV, voices on the radio, a face on the inside cover.
Some would surprise. Some wouldn’t.
But which ones? And why? I am desperate to know!
But forget all these famous people, it’s not going to happen, I mean, what do I think, the Dalai Lama is going to come into our bookshop, Do you have a copy of Lost Horizon?
All right, then, how about those lesser mortals, the rising famous – all those people you’ve never heard of before but you’re hearing about now, and only time will tell if they rise up to the full soufflé or if they collapse back down into that same great black hole of anonymity wherein reside (to their envy, say the famous) thee and me.
Like who?
Like, I don’t know, any one of a zillion people, how about the writer, James Lever?
Never heard of him? Nevermind, neither had I. You’re sitting there doing a bit of light reading (The Nietzche Quarterly) and one of the book reviews is about this parody of the Hollywood memoir, one which, like those memoirs, occasionally includes the odd escapee fact. It’s called Me Cheeta after its ‘author’, Tarzan’s chimp. (Yes, Tarzan’s chimp.) And in it, Lever has Cheeta going on about his impoverished childhood, how he was discovered, how he became a part of the Hollywood cocktail party circuit (cut to photos showing Cheeta clowning around with various glam stars, David Niven, etc), but most of all about how much he loved Tarzan and hated Jane. And you can’t resist this book, so you buy it, and OK, it’s not Dostoevsky but, hey!, it’s absolutely brilliant - all at once amusing, poignant, and original. And while the Queen could obviously just ring James Lever up, invite him over, talk to me, James, you can't. Merde! You can barely even meet the person who lives next door, forget the Dalai Lama, forget James Lever!
Which takes me back to Square One, who can? The Queen and who else? Barack and Michelle, who else?
It’s how to meet them, famous or not, if you’re not the Queen or Barack and Michelle or if you don’t know the right (sometimes even the wrong) people, that’s the tricky bit.
What you have to do is get inventive.
I got inventive.
And I am here to tell you that at least to some degree, and without resorting to even the tiniest libidinous exploit, it worked.
What I did was this:
First, I started a little Talks Series in the bookshop, one which would (and still does) allow me to ask various speakers to give a talk once a month between September to June. That was my platform, that’s Step One.
Then, Step Two, I set about finding speakers (pestered friends, wrote on spec) who were either: a) unknown but had a good story to tell; or b) unknown but only outside their field; or c) unknown but only to those living outside our planet.
Then for Step Three, the hard bit: how to get a, b, or c to agree? Or, to put it another way, how do you make an offer which doesn’t involve copious amounts of money (some hope!) sound like an offer which involves copious amounts of money?
Answer: you blind them with razzle-dazzle.
Like what?
Me, I talk up:
1) Our fantastic location:
The location, I tell them, breathless, is in Northumberland, one of the largest and most beautiful counties in all of England, nevermind unspoiled (‘unspoiled’, good word, hints at organic, the environment) …
… Wherein, in turn, is located our town, Alnwick, lovely old market town, complete with magnificent medieval Castle (you’ve seen it a million times in films, Elizabeth, Harry Potter, etc), with its new big-time garden (roses, tree house, etc) – all this followed by a pause to let all those goodies sink in …
… Wherein, in turn, is located a seriously big (indeed, for a town this size, 7000 pop, maybe even the biggest in the world) Victorian railway station (at ‘railway’, pause again, the very word replete with friendly associations, think, whatever your listener’s age, Thomas the Tank) …
… Wherein, in turn, this bookshop, our bookshop, also seriously big, 10,000 sq ft big, a bookshop described (whoa!) in the New Statesman as ‘the British Library of secondhand bookshops’ and in The Telegraph as ‘magical’ …
… Then I sum it up fast, rap-style – a castle, a garden, a railway station, a bookshop - and then (hit this hard) all this located just five miles (only five miles!) from the London-Edinburgh Express stop at Alnmouth, Alnmouth being this exquisite little coastal village not even ten minutes away from the bookshop, I mean, what’s ten minutes! (Follow this with a double pause to allow ‘easy accessibility’ to sink in, followed by Are you still with me?)
If Yes, I carry on to …
2) The unique venue …
Our speakers, I tell them, use the old Station Waiting Room, seats fifty, such a nice old room, that room - high ceiling, wide-planked floor, the original banquette seating around the perimeter. And, in cold weather, there’s this lovely blazing open fire in front of which the speakers stand to give their talks all looking, I can only tell you, so very picturesque. (Some even survive.)
These two together, the locale and the venue, usually get me somewhere, a toehold! Which I badly need as this brings me to that dreaded if unavoidable moment when I must tell them what piteous honorarium (fancy word for money - good, eh?) we can give them.
“Would you mind repeating that?”
So embarrassing. I look up and they are already out the door.
Until Stuart (a hero) figured out a way to make the offer look better.
How?
Double it, he said, but if, and only if, they spend it in the shop.
Doesn’t sound like much, does it? I mean, how much can double piteous be?
And yet, more often than you can possibly imagine, their eyes, which only moments before were slits, suddenly become plates: “Yes, Please!”
No, I don’t understand it either. I can only guess it has to do with some inner vision involving themselves and all these books, miles of them, there for them to cherry-pick and (as they see it) for free .
I base this on what I’ve observed when they are actually let loose in the shop with their chit, they go crazy. You’d think they’d never been in a bookshop before. You see them dashing about all over the place in their sandals and trainers, down here, over there, their reading glasses balanced precariously on top of their head, or on the tip of their nose, or hanging down like wire monkey from one ear. But always, always, wherever they are, clutching their bounty close to them, their faces all shiny, Christmas. (Touching, really.)
So far, so good.
But now to the final step and, for me, the most important one of them all: that chance at last to attain my own goal, the Queen’s Perk - the one that would turn any speaker, even famous, from cardboard cut-out to flesh-and-blood reality. Ready?
I ask the speaker to dinner.
For those of you who don’t live in England, this question may sound simple enough (“Can you come to dinner?”) but here in England it causes instant hyper-ventilation: one is being asked to dinner at the house of a stranger.
One’s face turns white.
This dinner, I explain to him or her as quickly as possible to allay the shock, comes after the talk. And, yes, it is in our house. But you are not to worry. Our house is the old stationmasters’ house just over there (you can see its chimneys from the shop’s front door, see?), no need even to drive, we simply dash over after the talk – will you come? And, no, we can’t promise a gourmet meal, but we can promise a truly decent wine - will you come? You and just a small handful of other guests, all vetted (swear!), will you come?
And, of course, the speakers almost have to say Yes, don’t they?
And the moment they do, that’s it, my chance.
Which I take in the following way:
While our dinners are on a rather less grand scale than the Queen’s (just for starters, we don’t even have anything so posh as a dining room; we all eat in the kitchen), they nonetheless seem to work out.
They start off after the talk is over, to tell the truth everyone relieved (look, those talks, a bit nerve-racking, will anybody come?) but only after the audience has had a chance to talk with the speaker first, as well as, please God, to buy their book.
All of which gives me, in turn, a chance to race over to the house and go into action (throw an angry pusscat upstairs, the spuds in the oven, those old dead flowers out). This, until the speaker plus guests plus Stuart finally show up at the door where I meet them, Miss Efficiency (too bad about this large band-aid across my nose). The candles are lit, the wine uncorked, the speaker toasted (small round of applause), the jazz in the background turned low and then lower still as people’s voices take over the space, the men’s jackets come off one-by-one (twelve people packed in together like sardines in a kitchen with an AGA going full blast, you can imagine) and the evening starts to roll.
And, all right, sometimes the talks don’t work, or the suppers either for whatever reason, you can never tell. (Though I can tell you it doesn’t help when you drop the main course on the floor.)
On the other hand, sometimes, they do work, even well. (Am I allowed to say that?) And as for me, I will have siezed this chance, you bet, to put the speaker next to me, talk a bit, catch that glimpse or try to, of the 'real' person.
Anyway, however it goes and even just to the degree that I’ve been able to do it, it’s been more than a perk; it’s been a life-line. It has allowed me to meet so many people I would never otherwise have had the chance to meet. And, yes, all right, there have been a few yahoos. I bet even the Queen has met a few yahoos! (I bet some people have even thought I was the yahoo, the sods!) But I’ve loved it. Still do. Learned a bit, too.
If you’re interested, I’m including here an alphabetical list of my speakers so far. And because this post is already way long enough, I wlll be putting that same list of speakers, together with what they do and a bit about that glimpse, in my Links on this blog. I mean, for all I know, you might like a glimpse at one or two of the speakers yourself. They range from artists and writers to engineers and astronomers to academics and gardeners.
Some you will have heard of. Most you won’t. Just know that the best and the worst speakers have come from both groups. (Just how true that would be is one of the things I’ve learned.)
In any event, it is in this devious way that I have achieved my own version of that perk which I have most envied the Queen. And if you say that to compare my poor man’s version to the Queen’s is patently ludicrous (and you’d be right), nonetheless, I can only hope that Her Majesty’s, exalted as it is, has brought her as much pleasure as mine has to me.
Speakers at Barter Books since 2001
David Aaronovitch, Lindsay Allason-Jones, David Almond, Carole Angier, Dr Malcolm Aylett, Dr Keith Armstrong, Corelli Barnett, Stan Beckensall, Sir Alan Beith, Carol Clewlow, Hugh Cunningham, Theodore Dalrymple, Marjorie Deakin, Philip Deakin, Thomas Deans, Alistair Elliot, James Fleming, George Gill, Tony Harrison, Peter Harvey, Barry Hirst, Dr Wendy Hitchmough, David Hutchings, Richard Ingrams, John Johnson, Julian Johnston, Peter Jones, Miles Kington, Lucinda Lambton (with John Jolliffe, and Hugh Cantlie), Frank Lawley, Dr Richard Lomas, Grace McCombie, Val McDermid, Claire Macdonald, Dr Ian Maitland Hume, Nicolas Mann, John Millard, Judith Miller, Mr Charles Moore, Jane Owen, Jeremy Paterson, Harry Pearson, Kristian Pedersen, Katrina Porteous, Matt Ridley, David Ross, Anthony Sargent, Anne Stevenson, Rachel Terry, Trevor Thorne, Joanna Trollope, Bill Varley, Sir Arnold Wolfendale
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Oh, I didn't even know about the speakers! I wish I lived in Alnwick! Have just done a link to your site in my blog - hope you don't mind. We visit once a year on holiday, but that's not enough so I'm glad to have found your blog where I can visit on-line in the meantime. The soup in the Buffet was fab, by the way.
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