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Hay, what about me?
Jenny Colgan
Thursday June 3, 2004
The Guardian
Bitter about hay: Jenny Colgan
Ah, Hay; novelist's dream. A chance to meet the country's readers and writers in bucolic splendour with - so I've heard - not a small chance of naughtiness. Exactly my kind of place, in other words.
Yep, after doing a fair bit of the festival circuit, from the sublime - Edinburgh - to the ridiculous (no offence intended to the good people of Guernsey, and their one books-cum-buckets-and-spades shop), I'd bought my Birkenstocks and was asking my publicist just exactly when it was my turn for all the villagey hi-jinks-on-Wye.
"Ah. You're not going. But, look, here, a signing in South Shields," she announced, in the distracting way publicists have.
"But everyone goes to Hay!" I said. "It's the best one [after Edinburgh]!"
"Hmm, not you."
"Why not?"
"Because you're not..." she coughed at this. "They said you're not classy enough."
This upset me quite a lot. (I should make it clear at this point that I write comic novels, not animal porn or anything. However, my books are often read by young women, which obviously means they are fit only to be stored in an east London warehouse in a dry spell.)
"You stopped putting me up for Hay, didn't you?" I asked her.
"No," she said. "Actually, I put you up every year, and every year they put a big red line through you. Why don't you go anyway?"
I can't, of course; far too bitter. Nope, every year I just have to read the coverage sadly, like the only girl in the class not invited to the party.
Festivals are funny old beasts at the best of times, full of people you only seem to see from one do to the next; delightfully eccentric hats, and sleep-deprived small children waiting for Jacqueline Wilson. It's one of the absolutely nicest parts of a writer's life to turn up, chat about themselves, then sell some books, (though probably not as many as the other writers you're appearing with and certainly not as many as the Big Brother stars being cheered to the rafters in the huge tent next door).
Edinburgh is always muddy and fantastic; Birmingham and Leicester are super-jolly; Guildford delightfully eccentric; Coventry I nearly got lynched at (long story); and London is, oddly, an entirely underground affair. As for Hay - well, I'll never even get to sniff their cheap white wine. So they can stuff their 39 bookshops up their tweedy arse (she said, classily...)
Jenny Colgan
Thursday June 3, 2004
The Guardian
Bitter about hay: Jenny Colgan
Ah, Hay; novelist's dream. A chance to meet the country's readers and writers in bucolic splendour with - so I've heard - not a small chance of naughtiness. Exactly my kind of place, in other words.
Yep, after doing a fair bit of the festival circuit, from the sublime - Edinburgh - to the ridiculous (no offence intended to the good people of Guernsey, and their one books-cum-buckets-and-spades shop), I'd bought my Birkenstocks and was asking my publicist just exactly when it was my turn for all the villagey hi-jinks-on-Wye.
"Ah. You're not going. But, look, here, a signing in South Shields," she announced, in the distracting way publicists have.
"But everyone goes to Hay!" I said. "It's the best one [after Edinburgh]!"
"Hmm, not you."
"Why not?"
"Because you're not..." she coughed at this. "They said you're not classy enough."
This upset me quite a lot. (I should make it clear at this point that I write comic novels, not animal porn or anything. However, my books are often read by young women, which obviously means they are fit only to be stored in an east London warehouse in a dry spell.)
"You stopped putting me up for Hay, didn't you?" I asked her.
"No," she said. "Actually, I put you up every year, and every year they put a big red line through you. Why don't you go anyway?"
I can't, of course; far too bitter. Nope, every year I just have to read the coverage sadly, like the only girl in the class not invited to the party.
Festivals are funny old beasts at the best of times, full of people you only seem to see from one do to the next; delightfully eccentric hats, and sleep-deprived small children waiting for Jacqueline Wilson. It's one of the absolutely nicest parts of a writer's life to turn up, chat about themselves, then sell some books, (though probably not as many as the other writers you're appearing with and certainly not as many as the Big Brother stars being cheered to the rafters in the huge tent next door).
Edinburgh is always muddy and fantastic; Birmingham and Leicester are super-jolly; Guildford delightfully eccentric; Coventry I nearly got lynched at (long story); and London is, oddly, an entirely underground affair. As for Hay - well, I'll never even get to sniff their cheap white wine. So they can stuff their 39 bookshops up their tweedy arse (she said, classily...)
