Tag: reading

Another Mapp and Lucia fan

We’ve recently had a Waterstones bookshop open in our “city of philosophers” (Lichfield), and they kicked off what we all hope is going to be a series of book events with a signing by the Reverend Richard Coles of his mystery novel Murder Before Evensong.

Since he had been on Celebrity Mastermind with a specialist subject of the Mapp and Lucia novels, which had also been my Mastermind specialist subject in the first round, it seemed we might have something in common (we’d both played in bands in our more youthful days, though he is a much better musician than me, and had far greater success with The Communards than I did with Ersatz..

So I decided to take along two of my own Mapp and Lucia pastiches, Mapp at Fifty, and the very exclusive Captain Puffin Comes to Tilling (not available on Amazon – special edition printed for the Gathering of the Friends of Tilling last year).

Also a copy of On the Other Side of the Sky for his bedside reading.

As it happened, there were far more people at the event than I had expected. At 12:32 (start of event scheduled for 12:30) the shop had sold out of Murder Before Evensong, so I bought a couple of the Rev Coles’s non-fictions, and joined the 40–50-strong queue.

When my time came, we actually managed to have a little chat, and I’d pre-signed one of his books with Major Benjy’s favourite shout of “Quai Hai!” and he did the same for me.

So a good time was had by all.

The Reverend Richard Coles and me at Waterstones Lichfield, with some of my books.
Posted on by Hugh Ashton

A new story – FREE download

This has been kicking around in my head for some time and to a large extent it wrote itself. I am not sure whether I’ve got it right, or whether it is depressing or uplifting – it might be seen as either.

It’s 500 words – just under – and it’s a story for these times which are currently wrenched out of joint.

In any case, it’s not going up as a page on this site, but if you want a free copy (Word DOCX format), click here. I would simply ask you to leave your thoughts and reactions as a comment here if the piece makes any impression on you.

I’ve entitled it “The Other Side of the Mirror” – which was the title of a song I once wrote and recorded with a couple of friends. It seems that the world(s) on the other side of the mirror, as in Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, Through the Looking-Glass, and a story by Borges, has a continued fascination for me. The cobbled-together Photoshop illustration comes close to my mental image of the story.

Bonus point (no Googling!): Where does the last sentence come from?

Posted on by Hugh Ashton