Thursday, December 01, 2011

Books in Foyles.

Caroline nipped off shopping to the huge new shopping centre Westfield in Stratford and, as is becoming traditional now, she found a book shop and took photos of my books. Oddly there was no Waterstones there and she found these in Foyles. I have to wonder what Christina Foyle would have thought of this. Many years ago I used to cut a field of grass beside Beeleigh Abbey where she lived. I even got invited in once for a cup of coffee and it was like stepping back a hundred years: manual worker invited into the big house to be inspected by the lord and lady, led through by a maid into an enormous room full of antiques and ancestor paintings. I managed to suppress the urge to tug my forelock, dip my head and clutch my cheesecutter hat against my chest.

6 comments:

Graeme. said...

Q: How many years ago would it have been when, if someone told you you'd have as many books as Arthur C. Clarke on the shelf of any random book shop, you would have replied with "fack off, ya loony" ?

Mason Loring Bliss said...

Clarke and Asimov are your neighbors on that shelf. Good company, if you ask me! I'd be pleased. :)

packrat54 said...

Makes quite a SciFi sandwich, plenty of meat there.

Neal Asher said...

Now is that one I should save for the video clip, Graeme? Nah. I'll answer it now. I reckon I would still have been doubtful on my second three-book contract. After that, I realized that if I keep producing Macmillan, or just about any other publisher, will keep publishing, it became foregone. As I have said before I'll only stop writing when the nail me in a coffin.

Yes, that is very good company. And I hope I'm as long-lasting.

Bob Lock said...

'I managed to suppress the urge to tug my forelock'

Hmm... very D.H.Lawrence, you sure you were a gardener and not a gamekeeper? :P

Neal Asher said...

I was the Essex boy with the machines, Bob. There was a gardener there right out of Downton Abbey.