No separation

April 11^th. 2020

What a week again for all of us. Doesn’t help having to look after a sick wife knowing that each time I go out I may pick up the bug. I received an email from Sainsbury’s though, telling me that they now have me on their list as a vulnerable person and I can register with them for on-line shopping and I am allowed priority slots. Great. I signed up, gave them my bank card details, filled a shopping trolley and went to the checkout. No, it doesn’t work like that. There are no slots. Not only are there no slots, their on-line calendar shows nothing at all: no reserved slots, no booked slots, and no special slots for registered, extremely vulnerable people. Can’t email them either because all their email addresses are ‘no reply’. And incidentally, I have a full shopping trolley parked on-line with Tesco too! Where next then, Aldi?

My book world is showing a very small sign of an opening because of Book Bub ads. I’ve sold eight books this month on D2D, and this is often reflected when I advertise on BB. The sales are spread around Apple, B&N, Kobo and Nook. Some are with Amazon, so hopefully I can make some inroads into higher sales. Or maybe my AMS ads will come to life and show some presence on my dashboard. I’m in for an Advertising exercise with Bryan Cohen’s ad school next week in which he will be challenging his students, and any other outsiders who sign up, to spend five days with him on-line rising to the challenge and realising a profit on AMS. Don’t know how I’ll manage to keep up with him, but I’ll just have to set some time aside and make the effort. I won’t neglect Pat though.

Last week I mentioned memories, and how songs trigger them. Well, something else triggered a memory for me: a post on FB. The person was singing the praises of Sir Keir Starmer, newly elected leader of the Labour party, and at the same time making some unpleasant things about Boris Johnson. Don’t know why this person thought it necessary to sling a bit of mud, but maybe that’s how some extreme politicos work. Anyway, my mind went back to when I was working for a living at the potato factory. It was a twelve-hour night shift, I was the only maintenance man on shift, and a pump had stopped working over the potato store. It was at the bottom of a 50,000-litre tank and I knew it would be blocked with mud. It was ten o’clock at night; just the right time to be in the pub on a Saturday night, but I had no choice but to call in Wally and his gobbler. Wally was a small man, about 5’3”. He always wore a single-breasted jacket and wore a cloth cap. And his face was covered in lumps; loads of them like lumpy porridge. Poor Wally. The gobbler was Wally’s old tanker, which we often used to suck out blocked drains and sumps. And Wally was an ardent socialist. Anyway, I managed to suck out all the water with a submersible pump, and then removed the inspection plate at the bottom of the tank. It was obvious what the problem was as me and Wally peered in at the sea of mud. And while all this was happening, Wally was banging on about Margaret Thatcher and the workers revolution which was about to come. All the Tory wasters would be put to the sword and the country would become a true socialist haven where all the workers would enjoy what was rightfully theirs. So, there was a working-class Tory and a working-class Socialist with a problem, but I knew it wouldn’t be Wally who would be clambering into that tank with a shovel to dig the pump out. We’re all in this together.

Still haven’t heard from Joffe Books. Wish me luck and stay safe!