Strange

Mandy Haggith started a bit of strange week by sending me a forwarded notice about ‘Combat Paper Project’. As many of you will know, Mandy is a major campaigner against environmental damage resulting from our excessive use of paper. So I thought – Hmm, more along that line. But no – this is an offer to make paper out of old military uniforms – a twist on the swords into ploughshares theme I guess:

“Combat Paper Project brings together veterans who make paper from their uniforms as the basis for cathartic artworks. As a prelude to a traveling exhibition of their work that will be coming to the Birnam Institute in November 2009, members of the group will be demonstrating their papermaking technique. Veterans of conflict and members of the public are invited to share their experiences, and are welcome to bring a uniform or any fabric holding memories of wartime to transform into paper.”

(If you didn’t know – I recently retired from a 26-year career as a Tornado pilot – so I have enough old uniforms to do a whole print run.) But, you know, I have a horrible feeling I wouldn’t have really fitted in…

Then the book trade took some strange twists. W H Smiths decided to only sell one publisher’s travel books in all their airport stores. So much for consumer choice. And woe betide the other travel-book publishers who currently have stock with Smiths (this from the Bookseller newsletter):

“The Society of Authors (SoA) and the Outdoor Writers and Photographers Guild (OWPG) have become the latest writers’ groups to hit out at W H Smith’s exclusive deal with Penguin, as rival travel publishers say they are bracing themselves for a “whopping great returns” list. The Bookseller revealed last week that W H Smith would only sell Penguin foreign travel guides from its travel oulets.”

Ouch!

And then a particularly strident message in the Guardian from Robert McCrum exhorting good writers to get back to ‘entertaining’ their readers. That must have been something like Portillo meant when he said that the Booker Prize judges had brought us ‘fun’. Of course in a how-could-it-be-otherwise sense, writers should indeed entertain their readers. But then you wouldn’t be writing an article in the Guardian about it if you meant it in that most general sense.  Perhaps I’m being picky over words – but when I read great works of literature from Camus to A.L. Kennedy – it isn’t quite ‘entertainment’ I’m looking for. When I watch the X-files I’m looking for entertainment (and, well, of course, some tips on how to find my local aliens).

So it seems the world is a funny old place this week. Luckily for me, we have our new bee colony. So I can go and tell them all about it. Nothing strange in that …  is there?

David