A LYING RETREAT...

My recent visits to the internet were not only a highly gratifying and worthwhile experience, but of considerable therapeutic significance. You see, I had no replies to my advertisement for a young man willing to be eaten, but five e-mails instead, three of which claimed to be incensed. Four really, but one of them was masquerading as a sales promotion for Alka-Seltzer and that new neurotransmitter miracle pill for writer’s block (All drugs shipped via overnight delivery). And if there is anyone else out there who remotely identifies with the same syndrome, I think I may have found the treatment: Sex in the afternoon.

Absolutely no doctor’s appointment needed.

A further e-mail came all the way from Australia, which I didn’t even know was part of the world-wide-web. I know that China is. But then, China is not nearly as well known for its crocodile hunting techniques, is it? Do they have literary agents down-under? I hope not! Not the likes of Mr W***** anyway. You won’t recognize him. He’s not a chef, but a well-known literary fixer who suggested - after I’d treated him to an excellent lunch at Loch Fyne - that I have single-handedly brought the art of bad writing to the greatest height of perfection. Did I mention that he also considered me unsuitable to be ever effectively merchandised.

I often have lunch in Fulham, usually at Lock Fyne, because, as you may known, I love fish. But that’s pretty much the most derogatory thing an agent can say about his potential client. It was not so much his inability to recognise what the public wants, which I found so irritating, as his sheer determination to convince me that he’d never read a manuscript he wouldn't have preferred. In fact, he described my MS as the most unusual he had seen in twenty-four years in the literary business and eleven working as a theatrical impresario.

Sheesh!

My policy, fortunately, is to believe nothing at all said by an agent, with a particular suspicion set aside for those inclined to bolt for the men’s room when you’re calling for the check. Did you know that ‘A Lying Retreat’ is an anagram of ‘Literary Agent’? Well, I didn’t, but it could have been worse, according to my friend Alice, he could have signed me up.

I confess to being relieved that he did not!

The plain truth is, that I am the twenty-first century’s least celebrated and most misunderstood female philosopher, and should ever a literary agent come to determine that he’s on the same intellectual level with me, it will be purely by accident.





Miss Moonshine