The Cult of the Author: how far would you go?

I heard a story once that a young woman had hitchhiked all the way from Russia to the Hay Festival in order to see Paul McCartney. She didn’t even have a ticket for his event!

Never found out if she got to meet him…

I usually find that a trip to the bookshop or library suffices.

Before entering this competition I would need to know if I would have to make the journey to Press/4th Estate from the 4th floor or if the books would be delivered.

Do you mean ‘distant’?

Right. 40 members of the Hoff fan club in Germany coming to London and camping overnight outside Borders Oxford Street and through the whole next day for the David Hasselhoff signing.

OK, not very good but I just want one of the posh proofs of the Lace Reader. And I would come and get it.

Actually I have just noticed that one can go no further than posing in the mirror for your photo on this blog and trying to imitate the pose of your worshipped author…

See jackets of the majority of celeb memoirs this Christmas to learn exactly how to do all-important hand on chin pose.

This Roche chap clearly has too much time on his hands.

Right, another cup of tea beckons. Where’s the cake?

When I was sixteen I left Essex, where I was living with my mother in a commune full of Scandinavians, and hitch-hiked to Dover from where I took the night ferry to Boulogne. I travelled with a friend, Johnny Mac, who was nineteen. He had just been sacked from his job at Felixstowe docks where he was responsible for monitoring the throughput of domesticated animals. He’d missed a whole consignment of Mini Lops.

We landed in France around three in the morning and walked through the town and up the long hill heading south. We were to hitch-hike to Paris. By four o’clock we’d left the town behind and were sitting in the dark at the roadside waiting for the cars to wake up when a figure appeared out of the gloom walking towards us.

She stopped to talk. A slim, slight English girl with a pretty face and winning smile, carrying a nylon sports bag with very little in it. She was fifteen and hitch-hiking alone to Barcelona to watch big boys senselessly wasting fuel driving round and round a short motor circuit.

Unlike the Bilbaino you met her goal was not literary but her boldness and sense of adventure surely eclipse his run of the mill travel story and deserve a book or three. Send them to me. If I ever see her again, I’ll hand them over. I thank you on her behalf.

Jecon G.

[...] The South Bank has been running a series of talks with American writers for the last few months, making explicit the importance of the current moment in American history for all of us. I saw Paul Auster, as I mentioned here, and then last week I saw Toni Morrison. As far as I’m concerned Morrison is a genius. She was the first black woman to win a Nobel Prize for Literature, one of only 11 women out of the 105 awards since 1901 (our own Doris Lessing was the 11th woman to win it last year) and her work, though challenging, seems to reach beyond the media literati and academics. [...]