magic

It’s kind of fun, being a small publisher. Every few days we parcel up the latest batch of online orders and wander down the road to our local Post Office to send them on their way. I’m not sure whether the bloke behind the counter sees our appearance with a load of book-sized parcels as something a little exotic – I need to send this airmail to Indonesia, please – or a bloody great nuisance making him search through his online database to work out just how long it’ll take a book to get to Australia by surface post when that’s all the customer’s paid for. So far, he’s kept his feelings to himself, and everything we’ve posted has made it to its destination – with the exception of a packet to Malmö, which the Swedish postal service decided to send to an entirely different part of the country for reasons best known to themselves before returning the book to us with the news that Malmö didn’t exist.  Strange folk.

This week, as always, we’ve sent our books to customers all over the UK and Europe. We’ve sent our first ever copy of City Baby to someone in Ukraine, and another of our books in on its way to a prisoner in the USA whose sister cares about him enough to contact a small publisher in the UK to ask if we can send him a copy of Dave Barbarossa’s Mud Sharks. We were happy to. And we can only hope he enjoys it, and that it does something to remind him of the bigger world outside the prison walls.

This really is one of the joys of our work, that it brings us in contact with people whose lives we know next to nothing about. Someone in Kiev wants a copy of City Baby. Wow. What’s their life like? What’s Kiev like? Will the book mean as much to them – or more, or less – as it does to the bloke on a farm near Carlisle whose copy is going in the post at the same time? It’s an amazing and privileged position to be in, where something we’ve put together will make its way across the globe to someone in a city on the other side of the world which is waking up just as we go to sleep, or drop through a letterbox somewhere in the highlands of Scotland and – hopefully – change someone’s day.

Which seems an appropriate moment to tell you that we sold a copy of City Baby to David Cameron this week. OK, so unless the lying toad our much-revered Prime Minister has moved to Ayrshire it was probably just someone sharing the same name. On the other hand, this summer may just be the one where we see Ordinary Dave on the steps of No. 10 wearing a Perfume & Piss t-shirt, or down the front at a GBH gig, giving it large.

In which case, remember, you heard it here first.