This just in from the Ministry Of Stories, a creative writing school for young people based on Dave Eggers’ inspirational 826 schools in the US. As you can see, we need everything – including money, of course.

Hello There,

We really need help. Over the next month the rather bland carcass of 159 Hoxton Street, N1 will be transformed into a monster supply shop, with a Ministry of Stories secreted behind its humble facade. We are working with a great team of designers, but we need people power to make it happen in time.

We are going to be holding working parties and need volunteers to come along and help paint, build, arrange, clean and hold things steady whilst someone drills – you get the pictures. If you can make any of the following times, please just turn up and lend a hand.

WORKING PARTY TIMETABLE

evenings of Monday 18 October and Tuesdays 5, 12 & 19 October 5pm-10pm every Sunday from now until 24 October Monday 25 – Thursday 28 10am – 10pm

EQUIPMENT
We are realising how much equipment a Ministry needs, and are starting a drive for donations. If you are able to donate any of the following useful
things-
please contact info@ministryofstories with the subject line ‘I can donate a [insert your much needed and gratefully received item here]‘.

a hoover
a mop and bucket
30 drinking water cups for a class
laminator
shredder
binding machine
children’s books in good condition (including picture dictionary, dictionary, range of ages up to young adult/adult) portable stereo teapot microphone and stand small pa system suspension files for filing cabinet telephone pinboard extension leads

We’d also like to borrow some things that will help us with our fit out.
Do you have any of these things that you could lend us through October?

Paintbrushes, paint trays and rollers
Stepladder
Dustsheets
Sewing machines
Large car/van and driver for IKEA trip

Thanking you in advance. Over and out.

The Ministry of Stories

It was hard to feel particularly sad about the passing of JD Salinger: most of us had become accustomed to the idea that we wouldn’t be hearing from him again. I am glad that January 2010 is over, though, because in the last four weeks, a lot of people who meant a great deal to me at one time or another passed away. Apart from Salinger, we lost Willie Mitchell, the man responsible for the sound of Al Green and Ann Peebles and OV Wright; Bobby Charles, the Cajun white soul singer, whose ‘I Must Be In A Good Place Now’ is one of my wife’s desert island discs; Kate McGarrigle, mother of Rufus Wainwright and one half of the McGarrigle Sisters, whose first album is one of my favourite-ever; Mick Green of the Pirates, whose guitar style influenced both Wilko Johnson and Pete Townshend; and Teddy Prendergrass. If the year continues in this way, then we will be left with Miley Cyrus and Taylor Swift by its end.

‘It’s over before you know it
It all goes by so fast.
The bad nights take forever
And the good ones don’t ever seem to last.’

- ‘The Best Of Everything’, Tom Petty. And that, I’m afraid, is the only rhyming couplet you’ll ever need; all the rest are superfluous.

TALES FROM THE ROAD 1:

I am on a train from the south coast back to London. Across the aisle, three elderly passengers, two women and a man, buy coffee from the trolley.
“What you do,” says the elderly man to his friends, “Is, you sip through the hole in the top of the lid.”
The two elderly women give it a go, tentatively at first, and pronounce themselves amazed and delighted at this technological breakthrough.
“I only found that out myself when I went to Hastings,” said the man.
What happened in Hastings? I wish I knew.

TALES FROM THE ROAD 2:

I am in a hotel in New York. Outraged by the mini-bar prices, I go out to buy a bottle of whiskey, and contrive to smash it to smithereens in the lobby, right by the reception desk. I end up raiding the mini-bar anyway.
Just as I’m pouring my drink, the phone rings.
“Mr Hornby? This is the concierge. You can take that bottle back to the shop and get a refund. The seal isn’t broken. You have the receipt?”
I tell him that, seeing as the bottle is in a thousand pieces, I wouldn’t feel good waving the neck and asking for my money back. I point out that the breakage was pretty much my own stupid fault.
“Up to you.”
Two minutes later, the phone rings again.
“It’s the concierge again. I’m sorry to trouble you. But do you have that receipt?”
“Why? I’m not going back to the shop.”
“If you’re not going to use it, could I have it?”
Only in New York, et cetera.

Tuesday 8th September

Nick Hornby in conversation with Rachel Cooke from 7:30pm at the Bloomsbury Street Hotel, 9-13 Bloomsbury Street, London, WC1B 3QD.

Tickets £5 available from Waterstone’s, 82 Gower Street, London WC1E 6EQ 020 7636 1577.

Monday 21st September

Juliet, Naked event at Topping Books at 7.15 for 7.30pm start at Topping & Company, The Paragon, Bath, BA1 5LS .

Tickets £6 with £6 off the book, available from the bookshop or on (01225) 428111.

 Thursday 15th October

Joint event at 6:15pm with Lynn Barber at the Birmingham Book Festival prior to a showing of ‘An Education’ at the Electric Cinema, 47-49 Station Street, Birmingham B5 4DY. Lynn and Nick will be introduced by Tom Lawes the cinema owner.

Solo event at 8:15pm about ‘Juliet, Naked’ at the Birmingham Book Festival at the Conservatoire, Paradise Place, Birmingham, B3 3HG.

Call the Box office on 0121 303 2323 or visit www.birminghambookfestival.org for more information.

While looking for change in my jacket pocket, I pull out a piece of paper which, to my consternation, reads as follows:

WARNING: NOT EVERYONE IS SUITED TO HAVING AN AFFAIR. THEY (sic) ARE NOT AN ALTERNATIVE TO WORKING ON OR ENDING A MARRIAGE. AFFAIRS CAN DAMAGE A GOOD MARRIAGE. ALWAYS CONSIDER OTHER PEOPLE AND IF YOU ARE GOING TO HAVE AN AFFAIR, PLEASE SELECT YOUR PARTNER WISELY.

Underneath this psychic health warning was the address of a website which, presumably, will help to undercut much of the above advice, just as cigarettes undercut the health warnings on the packets. I turned the piece of paper over and found that I was actually holding a simple London taxi receipt. Blimey.

Anyway. All helpful, if somewhat muddled, advice. Is an affair really not an alternative to working on a marriage? You’d have thought it was one or the other, really. The genius who wrote this is right, though: having an affair may well turn out to be the same thing as ending a marriage. I’m sure we can all agree that affairs can damage good marriages, although I’d like to fly the red flag for bad ones, too – in fact the effect of an affair on a marriage with underlying health issues, to use the current phraseology, could be fatal. The last sentence is just solid and valuable common sense.
We’ve all seen Fatal Attraction.

The Times reports an ingenious but work-intensive downloading scam, brought to an end by the Metropolitan Police and the FBI: a criminal gang (nine people were arrested) wrote nineteen songs, got them onto Amazon and iTunes, stole fifteen hundred credit cards, and downloaded the songs repeatedly until they had earned themselves $300,000 in royalties. Presuming that the money was distributed equally, this netted them just over thirty thousand dollars each – nothing to be sneezed at, certainly, but an an amount only just over the UK national average salary. I know, from my recent experiences with Ben Folds, that  song-writing isn’t easy, although I don’t suppose they spent an awful lot of time on that part;  however, the theft of fifteen hundred credit cards, and the repeated downloading, sounds like hard work. I wonder whether any of them wishes now that they’d spent the time window-cleaning, say?

My favourite song of the year so far is a cover. The original is by Crooked Fingers, and I have never in my life heard of this band, which makes me wonder, and not for the first time, how many other beautiful, brilliant songs are out there hiding away from us. (I’m sure there are thousands—and it’s a good thing, knowing that surprises like this are waiting for us the rest of our listening lives.) The version I’ve been listening to is by the National and St. Vincent, which is a lovely combination of voices anyway, but the song itself is perfect, a real heartbreaker: wistful, wry, precise in its articulation of a mood that doesn’t get explored very often. I got to hear it through I Am Fuel, You Are Friends, an mp3 blog that introduces me to a song I adore probably once a week; I know I’m supposed to miss independent record stores, but people like Heather Browne make it hard to do so.

In the Evening Standard today, the poet Ruth Padel is described as ‘the only household name’ left in the race to become Oxford Professor of poetry. I’m sure Padel is an excellent poet, and a perfectly good candidate for the chair, but despite all this, she is not a household name; I would go so far as to say that there isn’t one in the whole wide world of contemporary poetry, and hasn’t been since Pam Ayres stopped appearing on television with any regularity. What proportion of UK households could name the new Poet Laureate, or the old one, or any of them?

Household name recognition is difficult to achieve for any writer. I know, from the conversations I’ve had over the years with people from all areas of life, that I am a long way from achieving this distinction: anyone who has ever been published will recognise the question ‘Should I have read any of them?’ (The ‘should’ indicates the sense of moral obligation people feel when it comes to books; it is invariably used, like the Latin word ‘num’, to introduce a question expecting the weary, mumbly answer ‘No’.) I still remember an Observer article (on the news pages!) from a few years ago, which confidently predicted that a minor British novelist would become a household name by the end of the year, after a production company belonging to a famous British director bought the film rights to her novel. As if!

Who can name the author of, say, ‘Sideways’? Or ‘The Graduate’? Or the book that became ‘Slumdog Millionaire’? (The film that so excited the Observer’s arts correspondent never got made, by the way.) Certainly the films of ‘High Fidelity’, ‘Fever Pitch’ and ‘About A Boy’ haven’t helped slake my unquenchable thirst for global recognition. Indeed, I once found myself involved in a mortifyingly undignified argument with the person sitting next to me on a plane, who disputed my claim that I’d written ‘High Fidelity’. ‘I’ve watched that movie loads of times,’ she said. ‘If it was a book, I’d have noticed on the credits.’  I am used to anonymity; being called a fantasist was a new low.

Shakespeare is a household name, and Dickens; Harry Potter and Sherlock Holmes are more likely to illuminate light-bulbs than the names of their creators. Who else? Agatha Christie, Enid Blyton, maybe Austen. It’s a very select list. None of this means very much. Plenty of people are reading, and, more importantly, plenty of people can read; this is all that matters, in the end. But when newspapers start describing somebody as a ‘household name’ when that name is known to maybe a five-figure section of the population, it’s a sure sign that they have lost touch with reality.

An extraordinary and almost certainly unique opportunity to purchase a pair of my old underpants has probably escaped your notice, unless you saw the attractive picture of them in last Saturday’s Guardian magazine. You can, if you wish – but only after you have made a foolishly generous bid for mine ­ also attempt to buy pants formerly belonging to a host of other luminaries, including Nick Cave, Tilda Swinton, Ricky Gervais and Robert Crumb.
 
http://shop.ebay.co.uk/merchant/newnorthlondon
 
The pants have been decorated by my youngest son Jesse, and signed by me. I wasn’t convinced by the red feather, but he was adamant; I’m only mentioning the disagreement so that you know it hasn’t always been there. I need hardly add that your money will go to a good cause, although I cannot guarantee that this will be the case in any future Ebay auctions of my old underwear.
Times are tough.

The avant-garde goes primetime, in 1963: John Cale of the Velvet Underground on an old US quiz show called “I’ve Got A Secret”. Strange and brilliant.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?gl=GB&hl=en-GB&v=TYHIqMmtS-0