Sandstone Press

Making the Most of Fifteen Minutes

Posted by Moira Forsyth on 23rd August 2010

Last week I became an author in public again.  I was briefly famous when ‘Waiting for Lindsay’ came out and a checkout operator asked me as I was shoving stuff into carrier bags: ‘Was it you wrote that book?’ I’d been featured in the local paper, and was thus instantly recognisable in our modest Dingwall Tesco.  It’s not a small branch now, it’s a vast 24 hour effort, and I’m not famous there any more, except perhaps as the woman who shouts at the self service checkout - There’s nothing else in the bagging area!

Last week though, I was famous for fifteen minutes in Blackwells’ bookshop in Edinburgh.  They had kindly asked me to read from ‘Tell Me Where You Are’ as part of a Fringe event.  As is usual with these things, the writers were fine, but the audience was much better value.  There was the man who slept through the entire event, having overdosed on Festival going, and there were the eccentrics.

When you’re not reading you listen to the other writers, which is polite of course, but I was distracted by a woman with a flower in her hair.  It was a large flower, and she was a large lady. 

The rule for flower-in-hair wearing is much the same as the rule for wearing leggings.  If you’re over ten years old, don’t.  And yet, contrariwise as Tweedledum would say, I defend absolutely the right of any woman to wear a flower in her hair if that’s what she feels like doing.  It’s harder to defend the flower wearing woman for anything else though.

I didn’t mind her voluminous skirts, her flowing hair or the many bags and parcels she deposited on the sofa she’d chosen to sit on, taking up much more than her fair share of the space.  I didn’t even – much – mind her interrupting the young poet who read before me: ‘Can you speak up?  I have a hearing impairment and I want to be able to hear you.’ Fair enough – he did have a soft voice.  But if she doesn’t hear well, why not sit in front of the speakers rather than on the sofa at the side?  Anne from Blackwells had worked hard putting out extra chairs for the gradually increasing audience. 

I read next, uninterrupted, which may have been because I spoke clearly and was absolutely riveting, or more likely because she’d gone back to studying the i-phone which took up her attention for a good part of the evening.  During the poet who followed me (as you see I was between poets, which could provide the title for another blog – Flanked by Poets.  No, perhaps not, sounds vaguely indecent), our flower lady started fiddling with something other than her i-phone.  I watched her, trying to make out what it was.  Eventually I realised she was putting her hearing aid together.  This took her through the poet and on to the next reader.  Finally, she wedged it in place, and resumed (probably) listening. 

Then, after a few minutes, she got up and left.  Perhaps it was now revealed to her that she was at entirely the wrong event: ‘Oh, goodness, is this not the AS Byatt lecture on intellectual women writers?/ Stand up comedy for beginners?’ (You can insert your own suggestion here.)

I must hastily add that the rest of the audience was perfect, especially the very nice people who bought copies of my book afterwards. 

The rest of the evening was pretty perfect too, since I went on to have dinner with my son, daughter and niece, and Craig Weldon, another famous (this coming Thursday) Sandstone author.  We were starving by then, so chose the only restaurant in Edinburgh which didn’t have a queue stretching out into the street.  (This should have alerted us.) It did have a heart shaped pond with large goldfish swimming about, and a huge number of astonishingly attentive waiters.  At one point they were elbowing each other out of the way to shower black pepper and parmesan on our food.  The food itself arrived with suspicious speed, and we were rushed through the meal at a rate of knots more appropriate to Burger King than leisurely dining, but never mind, as soon as we reached coffee (and the coffee at least was strong and good) all the staff vanished and it was quite some time before we managed to find someone to give us the bill.

At the top of the steps to Waverley station I hugged my daughter goodbye, knowing I won’t see her again before she moves away to her first graduate job in London. As she skipped down, hurrying for the Glasgow train, then turned for a final wave at the bottom, I found myself in tears.  My son was very brisk, and told me I would probably see her just as often.  This is rubbish, but I guess he didn’t want his mother moaning all the way to his flat where I was staying overnight.

So that was my fifteen minutes over, for perhaps the next ten years, who knows.  It was fun while it lasted.  And I forgive the flower lady.  It’s not easy, listening to writers.