A vague impression of urine

Some days not so good. There is A with his infected wisdom tooth and grumpy, there is the long wait in hospital (and though I've brought a book I've managed not to bring my glasses) with B, whose broken metatarsal will mean crutches for weeks, possibly months. There is me who should be sacked as a salesman: despite Andrew Barrow’s fine talk on The Queue for the Sohemian Society last night, no expletives deleted, in a room so packed that at least one latecomer left a note instead of forcing his way in, I managed not only to sell just 5 copies but somehow – it all got a bit confused – at less than half price. (Plus online today becoming offline, and attempts to pay a bill fading into ‘timed out’, devolving into hour-long phone calls to try to find out where now is the money, with them or still with me.)

And the cover for the Apollinaire book needs to be rejigged: when it comes to the printing, that off-white colour for his name on the front and the panel on the back refuses to sit proud, it soaks so far into the manilla board as to leave just a vague impression of urine.

One of those days. But two good things. The NHS doctor, when eventually we got to him, was excellent: he'd actually read the notes, so we didn't have to recite the whole long history yet again, and he tailored treatment as much to the person as the injury.

And this notice in the new PBS Bulletin for J. O. Morgan’s Long Cuts: ‘A sequel equal to the seemingly matchless Natural Mechanical, a former PBS Recommendation and Aldeburgh Poetry Prize winner, Long Cuts depicts “further wanderings in the life of Iain Seoras Rockcliffe”, as Nature Boy turns man, striking his native wit on the edge of the wider world, sparking like flint on stone. A bravura performance of poetic ventriloquism, Morgan transcribes Rocky’s hard-won voice into hard-spun verse as vital and varied as the hero’s own freewheeling adventures.’

Whoever wrote that is welcome to the job of CBe blurb-writer. And sales person too.