26 Fruits

It’s been a big week for me, in a literary sense, and for a number of reasons. Other Worlds continued to get rave reviews from visitors to Oxford’s Story Museum. I had an extract from The angel of the stories published in an American magazine. I was thrilled that Norwich won City of literature status from UNESCO, and I now look forward to working on the International Writers’ Centre in that city. 26 Treasures went off for printing. And I went down to Falmouth to give a lecture on “what we can all learn from literature” to English and Professional Writing students at the university college.

I called the talk ‘Fiction works’ and my basic theme was that writers become better business writers as a result of reading and writing fiction. I’ve become more and more convinced of that over the years. Writing in a wider variety of styles – rather than constantly mining a single seam in, say, annual report writing – helps you become a more rounded, creative and effective writer. I’d point to examples in the opening paragraph as evidence.

It all coalesced for me in the strangest, most serendipitous way in Falmouth. I’ve written before about the importance to me of The wind in the willows. It was the first book I really loved, given to me as a birthday present when I was nine. My primary school teacher had read it in class at the end of the school day over a number of weeks. I loved it and asked my mum to buy it for me. A lifetime of reading and writing was the result for me.

A week before going down to Falmouth I was watching Griff Rhys Jones present a TV programme about Kenneth Grahame and the writing of The wind in the willows. I’d known that Grahame had been a senior official at the Bank of England at the beginning of the last century – something of a business writer by day who wrote stories at night for his young son. (Sometimes I’ve wished that Mervyn King had written more about the adventures of toads and moles and less about quantitative easing.) But my ears pricked up when I heard Griff Rhys Jones say that Kenneth Grahame had written the first stories in The wind in the willows while staying at the Greenbank Hotel in Falmouth.

How wonderful. This was the hotel I’d been booked into by the university for the night of my lecture. Of course, when I arrived at the hotel, I asked the receptionist about The wind in the willows connection. She pointed me down the corridor so I could see the facsimile of the letter written by Kenneth Grahame to his son on the hotel’s headed paper. Then I noticed the date when it had been written: 10^th May 1907. So it turned out that I was about to give my talk on this anniversary that meant so much to me.

All it needed then to round off this magical series of connections was a question from one of the students after the lecture. It was Paul Murphy who asked in all innocence: “Why do literary anniversaries seem to matter so much?”