I was called to London for a meeting with my literary agent to discuss the idea of publishing a book based on the blogs I had written on our twins sons premature birth. We walked from his office to a nearby restaurant. We had a reservation. Most people were drinking at the bar on tall stools, not eating. It was not posh or pretentious, but it was obviously an established Soho literary venue for writers and hacks, here for the gossiping, back-stabbing and above all, drinking.
The restaurant that day held a gnarled parade of grizzled and suited Soho literary veterans. I recognised one particularly haggard and resolutely-miserable face, a newspaper editor who I had seen once on a television show in which he had been promoting the view that “people are generally stupid”. In the flesh he looked like an illustration of “grimly they went into battle knowing that they could not possibly win” from a Lord of The Rings-type book.
But here I was with my shiny new literary agent. He was an intensely swish young operator at a Booker Prize-winning agency, all waistcoat, impeccable education and pre-war hairstyle: I was the chubby limp-with-desperation provincial wannabe writer. It was an unfair contest before it had even started.
My agent and I briefly discussed the internet blog I had written, a blog on the subject of our twin sons’ severely premature birth. The blog was written as a genuine piece of journal-keeping, to offload and share the tortuous process of watching our beloved sons fight for survival. It had begun a year before, on the very night that my partner Julie was first rushed into hospital to give birth three and a half months too early. I was just trying to let people know what was going on at first, but it then turned into a heartfelt expression of despair and shock. This blog had eventually found its way onto the national newspapers’ front pages and television news programmes.
For a week we had been the hot “real people’s lives” story across the United Kingdom and beyond. We achieved a “dong” on News At Ten. We sat exhausted on the sofas of breakfast television shows being interviewed by people with lovely hair, them with their cruel early starts. We had two-page spreads in right-wing tabloid newspapers that I loathed and despised. Our home had never been so tidy, as press photographers arrived and tried to pose us in a way that disguised both the stains of domestic chaos and our odd ordinariness in front of the camera. We were made to look photographically normal. And tidy. What a con.
copyright martin holdcroft 2008
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