“A few days ago,” says Nige, “I went past my bleedin’ grumpy old man tipping point. I used to think it’s age what defines when you become a GOM, but actually it’s simply after you exceed the crap accumulation limit.”
I suppose he has been looking a bit older recently. His long hair has a few lines of grey which isn’t Wicke’s Beige Gloss and his shoulders are slightly slumped, although that might be on account of the drinking angle he’s leaning at on the Tavern’s bar.
“Is it the Bilderberg group being more open about their agenda?” I say.
When I read about this in the papers, I suspected that Nige, a long-term conspiracy theorist, might be rather upset that the rich, and therefore probably not too grumpy, old men who really rule the world were actually telling people where they’re meeting and why these days.
But he shakes his head from behind his lager glass, just starting on a half-pint swallow, which means I have time for another guess.
“Is it because you can’t buy a single pork pie in Marks and Spencer’s any more without feeling bad that you didn’t go for the 6 for the price of 4 offer?”
At this he cuts off in mid-swallow, bangs down his pint and says, “Ah! Exactly!”
“Really? An M and S pork pie pushed you over the GOM tipping point?”
“No, but up-selling did. I had this building job in Heathrow all last week and stayed in the Premier Inn on the last night as a treat. I go to the bar and order steak and chips. The girl suggests strongly that I should take advantage of their special dinner and breakfast deal for twenty-two quid. I say no thanks, I’ve already got breakfast booked. But then she repeats how wonderful the offer is. A bloke standing at the bar says to her, he just told you, he already has breakfast booked. Then, with somewhat dead eyes it has to be said, she goes through it again. So I say that’s the third time and no thanks.
“Said bloke at bar tells me he’s over from America; hired a car at the airport and they tried to slip through a massive upgrade that he hadn’t even asked for which would have cost him another four hundred quid. While I’m waiting for me steak, we carry on talking and I offer to buy him a drink, so I order two pints from the same girl. This time, she asks me if I want any snacks with it. I say no, partly on account I didn’t ask for any but mainly because I’ve got a bleedin’ steak coming.”
“Ordered it rare, did you?”
“Very funny, Tel. You should be a writer. Anyway, that wasn’t the tipping point, even if she did ask me about snacks every time I went to the bar, even after I’d had the steak. No, the tipping point was the chips what came with the steak.”
“Oh-oh, I know you take chips seriously.”
“Yes, and these were as soggy as Asda’s economy frozen. Thing is, on the menu they’d banged on about how their chips are just right: crispy on the outside, fluffy on the inside. Then said bloke pointed out that those are the chips you have to pay extra for. And I think, why the bloody hell didn’t she try to up-sell me the better chips: that’s something I actually wanted.”
As we both know, I’ve been looking for the writing angle on what he’s saying.
“I’ll do it for you, Tel,” he says. “Authors up-sell when they chuck in a lot of extra tat for the same price instead of giving you more quality, like better plots and believable characters.”
He may be right but I think there’s more to it than that.
“I’m thinking about that girl in the Premier Inn,” I say. “She won’t have wanted to up-sell you. The management would have told her to do it. Same with the car hire firm; same with all branches of M and S. So, maybe the question is, when an author tries to up-sell his readers, is that because he’s not in control of his inner manager?”
Nige frowns, needs thinking time I can tell. Which means a couple more pints are on the way. It’s Sunday night and the Tavern is quiet; just the regulars in, most looking tired at the end of a long week’s drinking, but then they’ll be back in tomorrow.
“Why would anyone need an inner manager?” he says.
“We don’t need one. Well, maybe we do, to organise the day, get the bills paid and make sure there’s enough Evian in the fridge. But the last thing you want is for it to organise your writing.”
“Too much corporate-think?”
“Yes, there’s this modern office culture today in which everyone is constantly doing what they believe will score them corporate brownie points, rather than actually feeling what needs doing. Same in the media; same everywhere in fact.”
“I blame the Bilderberg Group.”
“You blame them for everything.”
“Can you think of anyone more corporate?”
He’s got a point. The descendents of the robber barons who stole all the wealth in this country and hardly likely to encourage rebellion against one’s inner manager. Managing is what they do, after all.
“So,” I say, “if a writer wants to produce work that’s original and interesting, he has to deny his inner manager but he also has to refuse to join any clubs because they all ultimately lead back to the Bilderberg group who are the anti-thesis of imagination and creativity.”
“You’re in a few writers’ clubs though, aren’t you, Tel?”
A this point, I decide it’s time for a long swallow of my own beer.
“You’re right,” I say eventually. “And the SF/Fantasy writers’ clubs are probably worse in some ways than most for corporate behaviour. They have tons of awards for a start, and clubs love awards because it’s a chance to reinforce corporate behaviour.”
“Won any of them yet?” he says, grinning.
I sigh. “I’m not saying I’d refuse one if it was offered. But I do think a writer has to save his club behaviour for after winning the award, not before he starts writing.”