A Migrant Trans Sex Worker’s Murder Has Set Off Protests Around the World

Anna Smith, this blog’s occasional Canadian correspondent, reports from Vancouver… Anna is a director of the Triple-X Workers Solidarity Association of British Columbia. She has strong views.

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One of several Vanesa Campos demonstrations held in Paris

Vanesa Campos was a sex worker from Peru who was working in France to support her family in Peru, after the death of her father.

She was shot to death by five men in the Bois de Boulogne in Paris this summer. The men were trying to rob her client, a crime they had already committed numerous times.

The police in Paris are currently more concerned to catch men who see sex workers than catching robbers. The ‘johns’ have become easy targets due to France’s new ‘client’ law, because they are afraid to report robberies to the police, in case they are implicated.

But the five men who shot Vanesa have now been apprehended and are awaiting trial.

Vanesa’s death has sparked international protests – in London, Paris, Vienna, Berlin, in Latin America and in Vancouver.

I spoke with Guillaume Roy, the French Consul in Vancouver, on Friday to express my sadness that a cultured country like France is trying to abolish prostitution. Well, actually, he is the Deputy Consul, but a consul is still a consul.

The new ‘client’ law in France means that the clients of sex workers are arrested if they try to obtain the services of a sex worker. The sex workers are not arrested but treated as ‘ victims’ of these evil men who want to compensate them for sex (or for simply spending time with the worker, which is often the case).

Prosecuting the clients is known as ‘the Nordic Model’, because it originated in Sweden.

Anna Smith (left) and Poison Pompadour at Vancouver demo

The workers in Sweden are not arrested. Instead, they are forced to participate in psychological counselling, evicted from their apartments, forfeit their property (dwelling place) and have their children removed from their custody. 

They are then ‘re-educated’ on how to integrate with ‘normal society’, which is absurd because I think most sex workers already know how to do that. I would argue that they are helping society to function, by relaxing men and helping them to relax and cope with stresses of modern life.

Politicians in many countries in Europe and in England and Canada are trying to introduce ‘the Nordic Model’. The Nordic Model makes working conditions much more dangerous for sex workers because they are then forced into working in more clandestine situations: outdoors in parks and alleyways and in isolated industrial areas. 

Also, due to the Nordic Model, more and more newspapers and internet services like Craigslist and Backpage are afraid of prosecution so no longer carry the contact info for sex workers, making them unable to negotiate with or select  customers prior to meeting them in person.

Besides, calling the law ‘The Nordic Model’ is misleading and sounds ridiculous.

I like to call it ‘The Nordic Method’ so it sounds like some archaic type of birth control.

In Vancouver last Friday, the Vanesa Campos protest demo was organised by Poison Pompadour and myself. After our demo, Poison Pompadour took all the protest people for cocoa and coffee at a nearby cafe. Then the two of us went for a beer and hamburgers.

French Deputy Consul, Guillaume Roy, accepts a list of the Vancouver protesters’ demands about Parisian safety

I marvelled that the French Deputy Consul had come into the hallway outside the consulate to speak with us. He was alone, unencumbered by secretaries.

There was only the Sikh security guard who normally waits at a little table outside the Consulate door. The Deputy Consul listened patiently as we explained why we were there and took our petition in his hands. The Sikh security guard took a group photo of us, with my phone.

“Well,” Poison Pompadour said to me: “Imagine how boring the things he normally has to do are as Deputy Consul. Talking with French tourists who tell him: I have lost my camera…. It is not every day he has twenty sex workers come to his office.“

… CONTINUED HERE …

A group photo of protesters, as shakily taken by the French Consulate’s security guard in Vancouver

Lynn Ruth Miller: “My lust for romance is gone. I bought me a brioche to love”

In the last few weeks on this blog, 84-year-old London-based American comedian Lynn Ruth Miller has been documenting her globetrotting gigs – in Prague, Dublin and Berlin. Her next international stop is Edinburgh for the Fringe.

I have just received this message from her:

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We leave Paris today and my lust for romance is gone. I bought me a brioche to love. It winked at me in a patisserie in Montmartre and I could not resist. It was a bit costly, though. – When WILL the day come that I do not have to pay for love?

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That message came with the diary she kept during her week of performances there:

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Lynn Ruth Miller at Palookaville in Paris

I am in PARIS!

There is something about this place.

Maybe it is all the wonderful things I have read about it… Maybe it is the glorious sound of the language… Maybe it is all the quaint outdoor cafes on every street.

Whatever it is, Paris is magic and I am here. I am here with Sarah-Louise Young who can speak this lovely language and understand what everyone is saying.

We are staying at a gorgeous flat in Montmartre that has a crystal chandelier in the bathroom and a fancy coffee maker that I am still trying to figure out.

Whatever happened to percolators?  

We are here with a lovely man who wants to make a documentary about me.  For reasons I cannot fathom, he thinks the world needs to know about a ditsy old lady who is addicted to chatting on stage with a microphone.

We three took a stroll to a lovely restaurant with wine, food and endless conversation. It is really very hot in Paris this week so we ate outside and made our plans for the time we are here.  We are preparing for tomorrow, when we acclimatise ourselves to the pace of life in this hot, humid, exciting city and get ready for my first gig here: French Fried Comedy. Yes, that is what it is called.

French Fried Comedy Night is English stand-up comedy in Paris with guest host Adrien Arnoux, and “your favourite local comics” Robert Hoehn, Wary Nichen, Noman Hosni and “special” Lynn Ruth Miller at Le Paname – Art Café!  I am coming up in the world! Or am I?

The show itself was a real test of my comedic endurance. Our audience was a dozen people in the basement of a bar and café, Le Paname. Unfortunately, there were only three people there who could speak English besides the comedians.  

I spent nine agonizing minutes on that stage chattering away to people who all had blank expressions on their faces as they smoothed their coiffures (we are in Paris) drank their absinthe, fiddled with their cell phones and exchanged bored looks with one another.  

The guy in the front row was Russian and had absolutely no concept of what I was saying. He stared at me as if I were a relic from the local museum. His girlfriend patted his hand and tried to smile encouragingly to me, but she was German. A joke does not exist in her language.  

Thankfully, a couple from New Jersey who sat huddled in a far corner got my jokes. Thank goodness SOMEONE did. They were on their honeymoon and had decided to take a break from whatever romantic thing they were doing to have a laugh. 

“Good news for me was that I could understand everything…”

Robert, the man who runs the show, is from Minnesota and calls himself Ro Bear. (It took me a while to get that joke).  

The good news for me was that I could understand everything he was saying because his accent is so like my own. 

I was told I got the most laughs in the evening but, I assure you, you could count the chuckles I inspired on one hand.  

Robert wrote me later to tell me this had been his fourth worst gig ever and I handled it like a pro. I shudder to think about the agony of the other three.   

But, listen…  

I am in PARIS!  

We three walked up at least a thousand steps to the very top of the city to see Sacré-Cœur, a breathtakingly beautiful church that overlooks the city. We lunched and dined in outdoor cafes drinking wine and talking and just being Parisian. Not easy for a Jewish yenta from Toledo, Ohio.  

Thursday was the gig that actually brought me to Paris.  

Sebastian Marx and I have been corresponding for four years about my doing English comedy here. I was supposed to do his room last Fall but he changed nights at the last minute and I could not change my Eurostar reservations in time. Which meant that, although I had come to Paris to do a gig, I ended up spending more money in four days than I had spent in a year, dining in outrageously expensive places designed to bilk the tourist instead of telling jokes to English people who left their hometown to absorb a little Gay Paree. This is the life of a performer.  

This time, though, I got here on the right night and actually did a gig that I had begun to think was my ever-receding utopia.  

“Former speakeasy with a sexy atmosphere”

The show began at 10.00 pm at Café Oscar in Montmartre. It is a former speakeasy with a sexy, dark atmosphere, lush velvet draperies, tiny sparkles of light so you can make out the drink you are served and baroque paintings of a bunch of women who evidently had just had a fresh bikini wax.  

And the audience understood English.  

Actually, very few of them were from English-speaking countries.They came from Sweden, Morocco and (mostly) from France; the native English-speaking people were from Ireland and the UK, but there were very few of them… maybe four in an audience of about 25. The comedians were all Jewish except for one man from Dublin, Darach McGarrigle.

I did a solid ten minutes plus… and finally got some laughs… in French, of course.

The good news is that Sebastian does a solo show in English on Saturday nights and I am opening for him this Saturday. It is on a boat and, since I am terrified of the water and cannot swim, this blog may very well be my swan song. 

Friday night, Sarah-Louise and I planned to sing our songs at Palookaville, an adorable music open mic place run by Steve Cass. I went there on that last trip and it was delightful and very, very fun.   

However, this time we three trooped over there way too early.  

I am beginning to realise that French time is even more relaxed than Jewish time. We were supposed to arrive at 6.00pm and we managed to get there at 7.00pm. The place was not even open. However there was a board outside announcing that I would be telling everyone jokes.   

We waited a half hour for someone to appear and finally Steve arrived, laden with groceries and let us into the place. It was obviously still in disarray from whatever had been going on the previous night. There were dead flowers in dirty vases, empty candle-holders and a candelabra dripping with wax. The keyboard was cluttered with unwashed glasses and cords and the sound system was sitting unplugged in the middle of the room.  

We decided that, since the place was obviously not audience ready, we would nip out for a magnificent French dinner with atmosphere.   

So far on this trip, we had not actually managed to find anything that we felt was REALLY Parisian, although ALL our meals have been delicious.  

“We all loved the food so much we forgot to check the time”

Anyway we did locate a place in Montmartre that was unusual and charming called Chez Prout. But we all loved the food we were served so much we forgot to check the time and so we missed returning to Palookaville to sing our songs.    

From what Steve said when we left, there was not much hope of an audience anyway.

Evidently, there is a lot of soccer going on at the moment and, in France, if it is a choice between a laugh and a goal, the goal wins.  

Saturday in Paris is always special and we lunched, wandered through art galleries and then I went to La Nouvelle Seine to open for Sebastian Marx’s show, A New Yorker in Paris, in the hold of a boat on the Seine. It was truly a good experience with all the laughter I always dream of getting and want to kill myself if I do not.  

We ended up at Chez Papa, a jazz place beyond wonderful with food to die for and an atmosphere like you always hope to find and never do. The jazz was from the American songbook so, of course, I loved it. 

Both Robert and Sebastian have invited me back, so this trip is the groundwork for more croissants, espresso and coq au vin… not to mention a few comedy gigs to aid my digestion.  

Frankly, I prefer North Korea to Paris

I suspect Elf Lyons can pronounce French better than I can

Yesterday afternoon, I bumped into comedian/actress Elf Lyons at the Soho Theatre Bar. She had only recently returned from Australia and, next week, is off to Paris. I had just been to Shepherd’s Bush. I think I may have annoyed God at some point.

I have been to North Korea twice (in 1986 and 2012) but have only been to Paris once (in 2000). I think this was a good decision, if you can call it a decision.

I was fascinated by North Korea; I can’t say that Paris held the same attraction when I went there, although Montmartre was nice.

I was in Paris on 21st March – exactly 15 years ago.

I was staying with two French sisters.

One of the local schools was called Lycée Lino Ventura, after the Italian actor. This seemed slightly odd to me.

I said to one of the sisters:

“Maybe in Britain, we should name a school after Michael Caine.”

She mis-heard Michael Caine as my cocaine.

Confusion ensued.

I managed to break my denture when I was there (don’t ask). Later, after having my denture repaired, I tried to thank the dental technician by saying: “Merci beaucoup,” but, because of the remnants of my Scots accent which makes me pronounce -oo- sounds idiosyncratically, it apparently sounded like I was saying to her Merci. Beau cul which means “Thankyou. Nice ass.”

It’s only flippin’ Noel Gallagher, ain’t it?

I am not one of life’s great linguists.

In the evening, we went to see the English band Oasis perform in concert at Le Bataclan Club. The rowdy audience had been indulging in English football chants, a large flag of St George was being waved and there were groups of very obvious Brits. At one point, Noel Gallagher said: “Is there anybody out there who isn’t from flippin’ England?”

That is my main memory of Paris.

That I heard Noel Gallagher unexpectedly use the word “flippin”.

Mad Moslem terrorists and a bizarre reaction by the Apple Store in Paris

Last Thursday, the Daily Mirror reported the Charlie Hebdo attack

Last week, as you may have noticed, there were two Islamic fanatic terror attacks in Paris which were triggered by cartoons of the prophet Mohammed in the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. Twenty people, including three terrorists, were killed in three days.

The attacks triggered, on Sunday, an alleged 4 million people marching on the streets of France in protest – including 40 world leaders in Paris.

By unhappy coincidence, my friend Lynn had pre-booked a weekend trip to Paris with her husband whom I shall call Peter (not his name).

This morning, she sent me an e-mail:

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Last Friday’s London Evening Standard on the ongoing drama

The weather in Paris was chilly so Peter wore a fleece cap and I wore a cashmere beret… But we were told to take them off in the Apple shop!

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I asked Lynn: “Did they think your cashmere beret was one step away from a burkha?”

I got this reply:

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It was simply a city with lots of people strolling towards the march areas and no traffic apart from police cars, police bikes, taxis and a very few private cars. The parking areas were full with cars with CD diplomatic plates. We did not go on the Metro as we prefer to walk everywhere, but also in case it was overcrowded.

Yesterday, The Scotsman reported the march in Paris on Sunday

It seemed to me a fruitless and expensive exercise. If every member of the Muslim faith in Europe had gone out on the streets to protest about the lunatics taking over their religion (although any religion involves lunacy at worst and extreme suspension of disbelief at best) it would have some purpose. If each nation had expressed its sympathy and explained that, instead of spending enormous amounts on policing such events and sending politicians to France, they were investing extra sums in policing the fanatics, that would have some purpose. This was just a similar reaction to the sick and maudlin overkill whenever anyone famous-for-a-day dies (Diana Windsor being the most extreme example); it achieves nothing.

I described our headgear in the Apple Store in detail to show that our faces were in no way obscured from security cameras – we were not wearing hoodies. If we had been Orthodox Jews, would Peter have been asked to remove his kippah/skullcap or, if Sikh, his turban?

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I asked my eternally-un-named friend what her view of the whole caboodle is. She told me:

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Sunday Telegraph reports story

A lot of people are talking about leaving France out of fear and a lot of people are living in terror because the PC media keeps portraying the perpetrators as disconnected or some such. In fact, most people feel disconnected, but they don’t go around killing people – and certainly not because of a feeling it is not only their right but their duty. 

The media, including the BBC is responsible for bad, biased reporting on Israel and Palestine. Our way of life has been eroded. Muslims should review their religion in the light of common sense.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, I remember the thing people feared was young people being brainwashed by the Moonies – How to rescue them from the brainwashing which had the person really believing in the cult. It’s ironic that the moon features in both – in this case, the crescent moon.

Nelly Scott aka Zuma Puma on clowns, feminists, being a schizophrenic Fascist singer and living in a cave in Canada

Nelly aka Zuma Puma talked to me in London this week

I have blogged three times before about the charismatic Nelly Scott aka Zuma Puma – about her schizophrenic Fascist singing Nancy Sanazi character at the Edinburgh Fringe in Frank Sanazi’s Das Vegas Night II and at the Malcolm Hardee Comedy Awards Show… as part of the Fringe show Almond Roca: The Lost Cabaret… and last week as host of the weekly Lost Cabaret club shows in London.

But I have never been sure how to categorise her. Actress, comedian, clown, puppeteer, singer/songwriter? She seems to do ’em all. I also made the initial mistake of thinking she was from the US. Never a good thing.

“I’m Canadian,” she reminded me this week. “Originally from St Catherines, Ontario near Toronto. Well, actually, I’m from everywhere. We moved around a lot.”

Nelly as Zuma Puma at the weekly Lost Cabaret club shows

“So what did you want to be as a kid?” I asked. “An actress?”

“My mother is a theatre director and my father’s a set designer,” Nelly/Zuma told me, “So I was just like doing theatre forever.”

In fact, aged 12, she was also dancing with Canada’s Opera Atelier. When she was 17, she had an award-winning role at one of Canada’s most prestigious theatres – the Shaw Festival Theatre.

“I was one of the witches in The Crucible in a 6-month run in the main stage,” she told me (without mentioning the award she got).

“That was when it all started,” she told me. “The woman who played Abigail in The Crucible became a great mentor for me and she had studied at Canada’s National Theatre School, which is where I wanted to go. But she said: Don’t go to the National Theatre School. I spent four years there and then I went to L’Ecole Philippe Gaulier in Paris and re-did it all and now I’m getting all the work… Gaulier’s a genius. If you can, just go straight to him.”

Philippe Gaulier, memorable mime muse and more of Paris

“So, when I finished high school in Canada, I went to study with Philippe Gaulier in Paris. I showed up there thinking I was this very serious actress and just flopped every day for about six months. Every day I’d come on and Philippe Gaulier would say Oh you are this boring Canadian little rabbit lost in the forest taking a poo poo. Oh she is so beautiful. Wow. You love her. You want to fuck her every night of your life. That’s what he’d say every day and then he’d ask someone I had had a crush on in the class and they would say No, she’s a boring rabbit poo poo in the Canadian forest.”

“This sounds like some cult breaking down your personality,” I said.

“But I WAS shit,” insisted Nelly/Zuma. “He was training us to find the magic, to know how to identify it when we were on our own. And so, after six months of flopping every day trying to be this serious actress, we started the character section – character/clown/comedy – and I came out the first day and I stayed on stage for 15 minutes and everyone was laughing and I’d never… It was the best moment of my life… For some reason, all this time I’d thought I was a serious actress and it turned out that I was a lot funnier than I thought I was.”

“And after that you went back to Canada?” I asked.

Almond Roca: The Lost Cabaret at Edinburgh Fringe 2013

“I went from Paris back to Victoria, British Columbia,” said Nelly/Zuma, “where I lived in a cave with a man named Caveman Dan and then I hitchhiked to California and around California. I was singing at this time – R&B, Blues, jazz and a little bit hip-hop.”

“With bands?” I asked.

“Yeah, doing stuff with producers and musicians and all sorts of people for years. I ended up teaching at a circus school in Costa Rica, met a band there and toured with them to Peru for ten months. Kind of just being an idiot on the road.

“After that, I decided I wanted to finish my clown school in Montreal because I’d sort of started it and done little bits here and there.”

In fact, she studied puppetry at the Banff Arts Centre, completing L’Ecole Clown et Comedie with Gaulier’s Protege and Cirque du Soleil’s first clowns Francine Côté and James Keylon in Montreal.

“I had just finished the clown school,” Nelly/Zuma told me, “when my grandfather passed away in 2012 – he was British. We all came here for the funeral and, afterwards, my parents asked me When do you want to leave? and I said Give me an open flight and I’ll figure it out. Then I went to Buddhafield and met Adam Oliver (her cohort in Almond Roca: The Lost Cabaret at the Edinburgh Fringe) at a hippie festival and came to London to visit Annie Bashford who I’d gone to Gaulier with.

Nelly: Nancy Sanazi at the Edinburgh Fringe

“She was playing Anne Stank (a singing Anne Frank) in Frank Sanazi’s Das Vegas Night gigs with Agent Lynch playing Nancy Sanazi. Then Agent Lynch got picked up to perform with La Clique and Annie suggested me to Pete (Frank Sanazi) as his new Nancy Sanazi; I was only staying with her for a week.

“After doing Nancy Sanazi at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2012, we had a few gigs lined up and Pete said Stay a couple of months so I said I’d stay until Christmas and I was also doing a double act with Annie back then – we were called Grumpy Lettuce.

“At the end of October, we did a show at Lost Theatre in London and the artistic director wanted to start up a cabaret night called Lost Cabaret at the Priory Arms in Stockwell and was looking for a compere, so I did that.”

“You’re certainly busy,” I said. “Do you have an agent?”

“No, I’d like one. Actually, I don’t know what’s happening with the Adam Lost Cabaret at the moment. He’s so busy producing a million and one things… Maybe we’ll do some double acty stuff in various places.”

“And then you’ve got these London Play Group workshops for adults that start next Wednesday,” I asked, trying to be helpful. “What are they about?”

Nelly (left) & Annie – Grumpy Lettuce

“Well, replied Nelly/Zuma, “a bunch of adults will come and we’ll get absolutely ridiculous, have loads of fun, play ridiculous games together – just like playful children’s games – improvisation, clown games – like how to find your ridiculous self, how to become free in your self-expression on stage and how to bring that play into life. That’s what we’re exploring. Finding pleasure in life, connecting to people in a playful community and making friends with this hub of people who feel they don’t have enough play or laughter in their life because we’re forced to live this adult lifestyle. Finding a way to be ridiculous.

“I’m also starting a feminist theatre show as part of a group of four people. We’re just starting to talk about it. We feel there’s loads of feminist festivals all over the country that we’d love to tour with our bizarre show. We feel there’s a lot of angry feminists who have made it all about angry women who hate men and we want to bring it back to equality and involve men in feminist theatre and say a man can be a feminist too.”

“So there are men involved?”

“Dan Lees,” said Nelly, “who was in Moonfish Rhumba.”

“And so the bizarreness continues,” I said.

Advice on how to get a book published…

Someone asked me yesterday how to get a book published by a reputable publisher in the UK.

My answer was to get a ghost writer – me – and pay me £156,000 + 98% of the royalties plus all the chocolate I can eat.

Sadly my offer was turned down, so my edited advice was this…

The conventional wisdom is that, to get a publishing deal, you need to have a literary agent but, to get a literary agent, you need to have a publishing deal.

In fact, you don’t.

It doesn’t matter if it’s fiction or non-fiction.

Fiction sells better than non-fiction, but it is even more difficult to get published. Almost bloody impossible, in fact.

Either way, the best thing to do is this…

You need to write a one or two page outline synopsis of what will be in the book – beginning to end – so the publisher knows what he/she is actually going to get.

And write perhaps a 20-page extract. This does not have to be the first 20 pages, but it might as well be. The reason for providing this extract is twofold. It shows the publisher that you can write. And it shows them the style your book will be written in – the same facts can be written a million different ways. An extract gives them a feel for the suggested book’s style.

Plus you need to include a biography of yourself – maybe half a page.

You are a good prospect if you are young (ie under 30), attractive and already have some track record in some creative area. And it helps massively if you can speak fluently. Being dead is not a good selling point if you are trying to get a publishing deal unless you are Jane Austen or George Orwell.

I know someone who was a ‘reader’ for Penguin Books. He was given a translation of a Japanese novel which Penguin had been offered. After reading it with growing excitement, his report to Penguin said that it was the most brilliant novel he had ever read and they would be mad not to publish it.

They told him: “We are not going to publish it.”

The author had, unwisely, just died and would be unable to do any publicity for the book.

Publishers want someone, preferably attractive and certainly alive, who can do publicity interviews for the book and who is ideally young enough to provide them with maybe 40 more years of books. They seldom want a one-off wonder unless you have an absolutely cracking story like being held as a sex slave for 14 years by Prince Philip in a secret cellar under Buckingham Palace or cutting off your own leg with a fish knife while being held hostage by Saddam Hussein in a Paris brothel.

When you have your idea, outline, biography and extract together, you should then go to a bookshop and see which publishers are selling the type of book you want to write and approach them one by one, having looked in a copy of the annual Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook which gives contact names, addresses and publishing requirements.

One thing you do not do is this…

You do NOT write the book first and then approach a publisher.

You want to screw an Advance out of them.

That way, even if the thing sells no copies, you have earned something for your talent, time and heartache.

If you approach a publisher with a completed book you cannot, by definition, get any Advance from them to tide you over while you write the book. You would have worked for perhaps two years for no money and you may have written what publishers don’t want.

Also, publishers like to feel they are controlling the creative process. Most publishers I have encountered are wannabe writers who cannot actually write creatively themselves, so they want to write and/or re-write through you while getting cultural kudos with their friends at dinner parties in Islington.

Never believe that publishers know anything about creative writing. If they did, they would be writing books themselves.

Those who can, do.

Those who can’t, publish…

…and try to interfere with your writing to give themselves a creative hard-on.

The thing to remember is that, up to the point of signing the contract, they can cast you aside and they have all the power. But, after signing the contract, you have most of the power. Under a standard publishing contract, they control the cover, but they cannot change a single comma of the text without your permission and it is unlikely (unless your book is utter shit) that they will throw away the Advance they have paid you. So listen to their advice but stick to your creative guns if you disagree.

If (just to use round numbers) you get a £9,000 advance, you would normally be paid £3,000 on signing the contract. You then have to write the entire book with no more money coming in. You then get £3,000 on delivery of an acceptable final manuscript. And you then have to wait for 6-9 months and get £3,000 on publication. So any ‘Advance’ tends to mean you only get one third up-front in advance of writing the book.

The thing to remember is that it highly unlikely you will make any significant money from your book. Literally hundreds of books are spewing into existence every month to try to find space on the same limited shelves. It is like playing the Edinburgh Fringe. You are unlikely to get noticed and it is like standing in a cold shower tearing up £50 notes. In the case of writing a book, these are the £50 notes you could have earned by stacking shelves in a supermarket rather than starving in a small room earning no money while you toil away at your creative keyboard.

If your book is a paperback, you are likely to get a royalty of only 7.5% of the cover price. So, if your book sells for £10, you get 75p per copy sold. Roughly.

I believe most books sell well under 10,000 copies in the British Isles and fail to make a profit. Publishers live on their rare big buck-earners.

When approaching a publisher nowadays, you also have to take into consideration the new phenomenon of eBooks. Random House recently signed a big deal with Apple to put their back catalogue and future publications onto iBooks.

My 2002 contract with Random House for the anthology Sit-Down Comedy specified a 50% royalty on any future e-book version. A fortnight ago, they sent me a letter saying they want to only pay 25% instead of 50% on any eBook version because the contracted 50% royalty rate “was arrived at before the UK eBook market had begun to develop and before the extent of our digital investment was known. Since this royalty was agreed, the eBook market has moved on greatly but, in the process, we have found that 50% of net revenues is no longer viable”.

Well, lovies, my tendency is to say, “Tough shit, life’s a bitch and a gamble, ain’t it? Don’t come whining to me if you mis-calculated your own business.”

But, with Sit-Down Comedy, in fact, it doesn’t much matter because, although the contract was with the late Malcolm Hardee and me as editors of the book, we agreed to split the royalties between ourselves and the 19 contributors to the anthology. So we are talking miniscule sums even if it sold loads.

However, I know another author whose book has been in print for quite a few  years. It may soon go out of print. Under a standard contract, if a book is out of print for two years, all rights return to the author. So, for example, Malcolm Hardee’s autobiography I Stole Freddie Mercury’s Birthday Cake was out of print for two years and now 100% of all rights have reverted to me and to the estate of the late Malcolm.

However, if this other chum of mine’s book becomes an eBook, my understanding is that it will, in theory, never go out of print – the file will still be available for download from the Apple/Amazon/publisher’s computer – and so the publisher will retain the rights until 70 years after the author’s death.

If my chum, on the other hand, refuses to accept a royalty cut from 50% to 25%, then it will presumably not become an eBook, the paperback will go out of print and, two years later, 100% of all rights will revert to my chum. And there would then be the possibility of negotiating a new publishing deal or publishing via some print-on-demand operation like lulu.com

We live in interesting times and that, of course, is the ancient Chinese curse.

The woman who has stayed in a bedroom cupboard for over two years

Last night I had a somewhat over-priced snack in the crypt of St Martin-in-the-Fields, a very pleasant place to be with subtle up-lighters to the vaulted brick ceiling and tastefully up-dated modernity out in the corridor plus a very emotionally satisfying circular glass lift up to ground level. It is a very relaxing place to sit and chat although, because this is the crypt of a church built in 1542 and re-built in 1726, the chairs and tables and kitchens stand on headstones and ancient bones including, I think, those of Nell Gwyn.

I sat wondering what Samuel Pepys would have made of this future world if he could see it. Pepys had a nude picture of Nell Gwyn hanging above his desk.

“What am I going to do with my mother?” my friend interrupted.

“What?” I asked, distracted.

“My mother. I don’t know what to do with her. She’ll have to go somewhere.”

“Where is she?” I asked.

“In the bedroom cupboard at home. She’s been there for over two years.”

“I know,” I said, trying to be sympathetic. “I had my father in the kitchen for about 18 months. I didn’t like to bring up the subject with my mother in case it upset her. Is there anywhere your mother liked that had a special place in her heart?”

My friend pondered this long and hard.

“Dickens & Jones,” she eventually mused. “She adored Dickens & Jones.”

“They might think it was bad for business,” I said, trying to be practical while remaining sympathetic. “And department stores tend to clean the floors an awful lot. They’d vacuum her up.”

“It’s what she would have wanted,” my friend said quietly. “She was always at her happiest in Dickens & Jones. But it doesn’t exist any more. So, realistically, I would have to scatter her ashes inside John Lewis in Oxford Street. She liked shopping there too.”

“How about St Paul’s Cathedral or Westminster Abbey?” I suggested.

My friend looked unconvinced.

“She would be among the great and the good of the country,” I re-assured her. “Nelson, Wellington, Chaucer, Charles Dickens, people like that… You could just go in and drop her surreptitiously in a corner when no-one’s looking. It’s all grey stone. They’d never notice and they must only sweep the corners and dust the edges of the floors by the walls every couple of centuries. I’m sure someone must have done it before.”

My friend still looked unconvinced.

“It would be like The Great Escape,” I suggested, trying to get her enthusiasm going. “When they drop the earth from the tunnel down the inside of their trouser legs.”

“Sounds a bit messy,” my friend said.

And that was that.

But I am still convinced it is good idea and deserves further consideration. We live in occasionally surreal times and have to think laterally to keep pace with reality.

Who would have thought a man would try to blow up a plane using a shoe bomb, that MPs would be going to prison for fiddling their expenses and that the European Court’s advisors would reckon it is against basic Human Rights to ban people imprisoned for murder, rape and terrorist offences from voting in an election.

Later, as I was walking through St Pancras station, my eyes accidentally strayed to the Eurostar arrivals board. The next three trains were from Paris, Brussels and Disneyland. I half expected to see Mickey Mouse get off a train hand-in-hand with Pinnochio.

Twenty feet further on, I passed an overweight man in his 40s sitting at a table. He had receding hair at the front of his head and a bald patch at the back. He was eating a croissant and was dressed as a schoolboy. No-one looked at him because no-one thought it odd.

In my train home, a middle-aged woman was talking to a stuffed meerkat. Neither the woman nor the meerkat appeared to have a mobile phone.

What would Samuel Pepys have made of this future world?