A friend of mine who lives here wants to start a literary festival and asked me if I had any advice for him. He’s a nice fellow and very friendly with my daughter, but he’s also the type who, had he been on board the Titanic, would have thought that the engines had stopped in order to take on some ice. In other words, he’s a naive man who believes in literature and writers and doesn’t realise that both commodities are unknown and probably deemed dangerous up here among the glitterati.
Perhaps I exaggerate, but I have yet to see any lovers of literature among the new arrivals: pushy, hungry bankers from Geneva, newly minted Brits who can’t pronounce the letter ‘H’, vulgar short and stubby types from the Gulf, and women-abusing Saudis. Nor is my friend’s idea as original as it sounds.
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