Yesterday lunchtime I strolled past WH Smith in Milton Keynes shopping centre. A book signing was about to take place and a significant queue of people waited outside the store. Bearing in mind my recent opportunity to see Michael Palin in similar circumstances; I made a couple of observations that are my justification for scribbling this piece.
Firstly, the queue for Michael Palin (MP), who in my opinion has a status equivalent to UK royalty, was small in comparison to this queue (and how could that be right?).
Secondly I genuinely had no idea who James Arthur was!
The queue for James Arthur (JA) was primarily made up of awkward looking teenagers and twenty somethings, and that was the giveaway that I must be out of touch. When I queued up to meet MP, I chatted with a number of my fellow queue members – in the JA queue, the people were struggling to talk to each other and I wouldn’t have known where to start a conversation with many of the glum looking souls.
Upon my arrival back in the office, and intrigued that I had missed out on some literary star, I had to ask my younger colleagues who the character was. I was told (in tones that suggested I must come from a different planet) that he had won ‘X’ Factor!
This is a programme I make more effort to avoid than communicable diseases and so I guess it was no surprise that I had never heard of Mr Arthur.
Still my curiosity was piqued and I visited Amazon to look into JA’s book. One review made me laugh and here’s a one line extract – “written by a dimwit, marketed to dimwits, and bought by dimwits”. Not the kind of review that makes me regret my decision not to buy the book, meet the author or watch the X programme. If you read the reviews yourself, you’ll see that the contributors to the debate struggle to write in coherent English.
My final feeling was that I hoped that the queue at WH Smith for the illustrious Mr Palin had grown considerably after my visit and that he hadn’t been outnumbered by the young Mr Arthur. That just wouldn’t do.
I also hope that I don’t sit around our tree on Christmas day and find that JA’s ‘My Story’ has ended up on my present mound.
A bah humbug sir. Oh go on then!*
*A variation on a Monty Python sketch featuring Mr Creosote
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Firstly, the queue for Michael Palin (MP), who in my opinion has a status equivalent to UK royalty, was small in comparison to this queue (and how could that be right?).
Secondly I genuinely had no idea who James Arthur was!
The queue for James Arthur (JA) was primarily made up of awkward looking teenagers and twenty somethings, and that was the giveaway that I must be out of touch. When I queued up to meet MP, I chatted with a number of my fellow queue members – in the JA queue, the people were struggling to talk to each other and I wouldn’t have known where to start a conversation with many of the glum looking souls.
Upon my arrival back in the office, and intrigued that I had missed out on some literary star, I had to ask my younger colleagues who the character was. I was told (in tones that suggested I must come from a different planet) that he had won ‘X’ Factor!
This is a programme I make more effort to avoid than communicable diseases and so I guess it was no surprise that I had never heard of Mr Arthur.
Still my curiosity was piqued and I visited Amazon to look into JA’s book. One review made me laugh and here’s a one line extract – “written by a dimwit, marketed to dimwits, and bought by dimwits”. Not the kind of review that makes me regret my decision not to buy the book, meet the author or watch the X programme. If you read the reviews yourself, you’ll see that the contributors to the debate struggle to write in coherent English.
My final feeling was that I hoped that the queue at WH Smith for the illustrious Mr Palin had grown considerably after my visit and that he hadn’t been outnumbered by the young Mr Arthur. That just wouldn’t do.
I also hope that I don’t sit around our tree on Christmas day and find that JA’s ‘My Story’ has ended up on my present mound.
A bah humbug sir. Oh go on then!*
*A variation on a Monty Python sketch featuring Mr Creosote
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