Quintin Jardine's blog

Praise indeed from a fellow author. That’s nice; thank you very much. Now I must go and wallow some more in the dark side.

I read something a couple of days ago that has me a little alarmed. Britain’s dairy farmers are sending out distress signals. They are saying that they are being forced by their customers to accept prices that are below the cost of production, and that they are facing oblivion. Yes, I know, ‘Show me a poor farmer,’ but twenty years ago I made a PR pitch to the Scottish Dairy Council, and as my memories of that occasion put me instinctively on their side.

The debate can rage on, and I’m all for reasonable pricing, but there’s this: if you are a UK consumer reading this. If the farmers are right, and the industry goes into freefall, do you want to be forced to buy imported UHT milk produced in countries where our government has no way of monitoring standards?

Last summer, as part of the launch of A Rush of Blood (which is out in paperback very soon, incidentally) I spent a day long the south coast, visiting a warehouse and several stores owned by an enterprising firm trading as British Book Shops. I was told that the company was a management buy-out, committed to growth, with a policy of value for the customer’s money. I was welcomed by the top brass and on the shop floor and was nothing but impressed everywhere I went, not least because they’d made me their author of the month.

Yesterday, a friend in the trade told me that the chain has gone into administration. Theoretically that doesn’t mean it’s gone bust; it’s in the hands of an appointed administrator whose task is to run the business short term while trying to sell it as a going concern. It’s something we’re hearing more and more these days in the football business, where for some reason it’s regarded as a crime and punished by a fine in the form of a league points deduction. In the real business world the results are usually more definitive than being pushed around by your holier than thou competitors. In the real world, administration is usually a step taken to ward off the Receiver, the specialist accountant whose role is that of a corporate hangman, come to wind up the business.

In recent years two UK national book chains have gone into administration, like BBS. In the case of Ottakars, some of their stores were bought by competitors and some staff kept their jobs, but the business as such went under. With Borders, it simply folded. Today, Waterstones is the only specialist national book chain in Britain. (I say ‘specialist’ as a nod to my friends in W H Smith, which has probably sold more books than anyone else over the years but which tends to offer less choice in its multi-purpose outlets.) If the big W has no more high street opposition it’s bound to survive, you say. Well no, because it’s part of the deeply troubled HMV group, which is in major trouble, word being that its suppliers could face difficulty in insuring against loss in trading with it. If they can’t insure, HMV can’t  get stock; that’s how it works.

We live in an age which demands that blame must be attributed, so, whose fault is this? Well, it’s yours. And it’s mine. Every time you buy a book from Amazon or another on-line operation, that’s another nail in the coffin of another bookshop. Every time http://www.campbellreadbooks.com, my son AJ’s business, sells you a book, that’s another. Every time you buy a book from a supermarket, that’s half a dozen of them.

But no, the world is real and the world is earnest. Online trading exists, the Tescopoly exists, and Luddism doesn’t work in practice. We can’t legislate or insulate against progress. Or can we? Need we allow the bulk purchasing power of a large organisation to be used as a weapon against its smaller competitors?

I spend my life in pursuit of ideals. Some are achievable, some are not. But here’s one that should be. I say it should be the law that when a manufacturer agrees a price per unit for its product with its  biggest retail customers, that price should be available to every retailer in the land, through wholesalers if necessary. To give this provision a few more teeth, it should be illegal for a retailer to sell new product below the price of acquisition. In other words, no more loss leaders. In the book business, who would suffer from that, long-term? As I see it, nobody; if things go on as they are, the entire independent book trade will disappear. As it is, most of them have to sell coffee to survive. Every publisher will tell you of its commitment to the independent sector, so let government give them all the tools to deliver on that commitment.

Does this reek of an author’s self-interest? Sure. But ask yourself; do you want to have to rely on supermarkets and Amazon, which has become a glorified eBay, as your only booksellers? Because if you do, pretty soon they’ll be telling you what you can and can’t buy.

Lovely day outside, but it means nothing to me; I’m hard at work now on the next project and I have targets to meet. The slight downside is a back muscle spasm that comes upon me every so often, but it’s good to suffer for one’s art.

Just getting into Skinner 22, scheduled pub date June 2012. I’ve even got a title, but I’m keeping that secret for a year or so.

I see that Katie Price has binned her latest, Alex Reid, a cage fighter by profession. I happened to catch Alex’s last fight, by accident, on an obscure satellite channel. He’s tough, as they all are, but it struck me, even with my limited knowledge of MMA, that he isn’t very good. If he was the top boy in the UFC, rather that a bammer in BAMMA, I wonder if he’d have been ditched so quickly. Truth is, I care nothing for such people, but I am concerned that the headline that announced the separation of these talent-free zones was so large that even I couldn’t miss it. I hate the cult of  the celebrity: it’s completely out of control. Don’t we live in a strange world when we can rage against bankers’s bonuses, yet be oblivious and indifferent to the fact that the likes of the model formerly known as Jordan can amass vast fortunes, while contributing only to the dumbing down of our society?

I’ve just noted that Apple made a profit of $6bn in the last quarter of 2010. No wonder; their kit may be lovely to look at, and delightful to hold, but it’s also damned expensive, and backed up by very little in the way of customer service beyond that which is statutory, as I know to my not inconsiderable cost. If ever there was a demonstration of the power of global marketing, Apple is it.

I’d hoped that we’d heard the last of the Chilcot Inquiry, but sadly we haven’t. It seems that the circus is pitching its very expensive tent once again and we’re in for another round of questioning of our once-elected leaders by a group of people with no obvious qualifications for the task they have been given. By whom were they given it? By Captain Barbossa, our departed and unlamented former Prime Minister, in June 2009. Why? This is the official reason offered at the time: ‘to identify lessons that can be learned from the Iraq conflict.’ Simple enough, but this is the spin the chair, Sir John Chilcot put on it when he outlined what he saw as his terms of reference: ‘. . . the essential points, as set out by the Prime Minister and agreed by the House of Commons, are that this is an Inquiry by a committee of Privy Counsellors. It will consider the period from the summer of 2001 to the end of July 2009, embracing the run-up to the conflict in Iraq, the military action and its aftermath. We will therefore be considering the UK’s involvement in Iraq, including the way decisions were made and actions taken, to establish, as accurately as possible, what happened and to identify the lessons that can be learned. Those lessons will help ensure that, if we face similar situations in future, the government of the day is best equipped to respond to those situations in the most effective manner in the best interests of the country.’

That all sounds great, but the real reason that Barbossa set the thing in play was that there was an election in the offing and he wanted to spin the public blame for Iraq away from him and on to Tony Blair.

I’m not clear just how the nonentities who make up the committee of inquiry got to be privy counsellors, but it is apparent that the intake that year wasn’t very good. Check their CVs and you’ll find that they’re a crowd of civil servants, academics, diplomats and do-gooders with no experience at all of the sharp end of the kind of decision making on which they will be passing judgement, when eventually they get round to writing their already delayed report, which, I tell you now, will come to have as much historical relevance as a failed and discarded betting slip.

With public spending cuts biting hard, I’m amazed that the Coalition has left Chilcot untouched, with its nose still in the public trough. The fact that they are still calling witnesses eighteen months down the road, and demanding that legitimately private correspondence be made public, indicates to me that they have lost what little grasp they ever had of the plot. They should be told to wind up, shut up and start drafting, without further delay.

Just had an interesting comment from my friend Nurmi, remarking that vacuous would be a step up in the US. Could it be that they’ve all been crapping themselves ever since since the great 1976 movie ‘Network‘? Its message was, ‘Get too controversial and eventually someone in the audience will step up and blow you away.’ There is a wonderful line in that movie: “You are television incarnate . . . indifferent to suffering, insensitive to joy. All of life is reduced to the common rubble of banality.”

I caught an item on BBC Breakfast this morning, about the effect of tuition fees on the average student. After a few minutes of watching Bill and Sian trying to coax the answer their producer wanted out of a pretty lass who had clearly flunked articulacy classes, I found myself asking, ‘What’s the point of this?’

When I was a younger man, there was no early morning television. If you wanted to catch up with the day’s affairs radio did the job perfectly well. Now we have immaculately dressed people on telly, being paid vast sums to front expensively produced programmes that are either vacuous, in the case of the ITV version, which has lost any hook it ever had now that the world knows that its presenters really are only good friends and no more, or on BBC, the bland leading the bland in debating topics in which most viewers have no real interest. In theory the viewer has a choice between being entertained or informed, but in practice neither is happening.

So here’s my question. If BBCtv binned the whole Breakfast set-up and stuck a camera in the ‘Today’ radio studio to look in on Jim Naughtie etc in shirtsleeves and headsets, would its audience be better served or worse in terms of its current affairs coverage? No-brainer, folks. Having just forked out £145 for this year’s increased Broadcasting Tax (I refuse to use the term licence fee) at a time when everyone but the BBC is cutting costs, I find myself wishing it would do just that. Until it does, I’m going to have to put up with sound only.

If you are addicted, it was possible to watch live football on Sky Sports yesterday for ten hours on the trot, with barely a break. I am not, so I was selective. I stuck to  Man U and Barcelona. While the mighty Reds still manage to top the Premier League, they are not playing particularly well, and owe their present position more to their defence than to the runners, or in Berbatov’s case, the jogger, up front. Barça, on the other hand, continue to show what is possible when eleven guys train, think and play as one, and give real meaning to the over-used term ‘The beautiful game’. I suggest that Murdoch considers switching their matches from the Sports channel to Sky Arts, for that’s where they belong. Mes que  un club.

I don’t usually get too excited about crime stories, particularly if I’ve read the books. (Yes, I know the old camel story, and the pedantic view that printed word and TV adaptation are entirely different experiences, to be judged separately, but in the real world, people do rate one against the other.) So when the BBC series based on Michael Dibdin’s Aurelio Zen came along, I was able to watch it free of preconceptions, having barely heard of him, let alone read any of the books. There were three in all, and for me they worked. I’m looking forward to  the next adventures of the laid-back Venetian ‘tec, who always comes up smelling of roses. The Roman background helped, but still; if Skinner or Primavera were ever pursued by television, that’s the crew I’d want to work with.

You may have finished the Skinner series, Allison, but I haven’t. Let me repeat; Grievous Angel will be in the shops in June, three months after The Loner.

Our sympathies are with all you Queenslanders. AJ just processed an order from a buyer in Brisbane; he made sure the packaging was waterproof. We’ve been complaining about show for the last month. Rather twice the amount than half of what you guys have experienced. Snow melts and goes way; the aftermath of flooding can stay around for years.

I watched a very strange football match on telly last night. West Ham were playing Arsenal, and they were thumped. ‘What’s strange about that?’ you ask. Of itself, nothing, but the match was played against the extraordinary background of that morning’s newspapers, announcing that the Hammers’ manager, the experienced and well-liked Avram Grant, would be fired after the game, and replaced by Martin O’Neill, who walked out on his last club in the summer in an apparent dispute over transfer policy. The rumours of the change were so strong that they could only have come from a source within the football club itself. They could have been dispelled by a strong statement by the club’s owners, but they weren’t. Instead the match went ahead with the TV cameras spending more time looking at the technical areas than at the pitch, and at the end, Avram threw his club scarf into the crowd, a gesture that was interpreted as one of farewell. This morning there are suggestions that  Martin O’Neill isn’t too keen on the job after all. Who could blame him? Would you want to work for people like that?

Just checked and find that Somewhere Over the Rainbow is in the top five best sellers in the political fiction section of the Amazon UK Kindle store. My thanks to everyone who put it there.

‘Such a perfect day, I’m glad I spent it with you’.

The you in question being the step-granddaughter, Mia, who is now going on for seven months old, and who seems to have taken a shine to Avi Quint. Abuela Eileen and I took her for a walk this afternoon, to give her mum some personal time. It was going on for 20c in L’Escala, so we went to the beach and back. She was sound asleep when we got home, and stayed that way for some time. Brownie points.

This evening granny and I ate out in Cal Galan, one of the real Old Town restaurants. It’s been a while since I had hamburger and chips and a few canyas. F****** magic.

I’m not in the first flush of youth. I’m not even in the first flush of middle age. That means that I’m resolutely opposed to ageism. Therefore I welcomed the enlightened decision of the employment tribunal that ruled in favour of Miriam O’Reilly, a female BBC presenter who was ditched on the ground that high definition television would pick up her wrinkles. (She certainly looked bloody good at her press conference, on camera with her solicitors’ practice logo as the back-drop. How tacky was that?)

Yes, well done Miriam, but . . . I fear the downside may be that our national broadcaster, which normally has a fetish for political correctness, will react by going to the other extreme and flooding the airwaves with fifty-something presenters regardless of whether they’re any good at the job. We may also even people going out of their way to seem deliberately dowdy. I caught the BBC news channel yesterday; at the time there were two female presenters, and one of them bore a strong resemblance to an unmade bed. I wondered if that was a political statement of a sort, or whether the producer of the day was simply afraid to suggest that she might have tidied herself up.  (Before anyone thinks I’m being sexist here, let me add that in his BBC days, Adrian Chiles seemed to take pride in going on air looking like a slob who’d been hauled out of the pub next door.)

I read today that President Obama intends to ease restrictions on citizens travelling to Cuba. It seems that religious groups and students will be able to go there, but that the general ban on travel to the USA’s nearest offshore neighbour will remain in place. I was seventeen years old at the time of the Cuban missile crisis, so I understand, possibly better than some younger Americans, the underlying reasons behind the isolation of the Castro regime. Also I hesitate ever to lecture another nation about its politics when our own leave much to be desired. Yet I do wonder whether anyone has considered whether a policy that denies entry to the modern evolving world, by hamstringing a national economy through a fifty-year trade embargo, is ever likely to lead to reconciliation. I know that the President has to walk a fine line. Perhaps this announcement (and even that has been opposed by Florida Republicans)  is the first step towards a more general relaxation.

Primavera will be pleased to hear that. Her third adventure, As Easy as Murder, will be out there in almost exactly a year from now. Seems like a while, I know, but I have to fit in The Loner, in March and Grievous Angel, that’s Skinner 21, in June.