Ursula le Guin: in memory of an outstanding writer

I was alone, with a stranger, inside the walls of a dark palace, in a strange snow-changed city, in the heart of the Ice Age of an alien world.

The words are spoken by a representative of the ‘Ekumen’, a federation of worlds, which has as one of its missions to find and make contact with all the far flung colonies of humankind across our galaxy. One of the driving forces for that mission is the knowledge that all of us, in every planet and solar system, are descended from one people, the Hain: the oldest human group with not thousands of years of civilisation behind them, but millions – more history than anyone can take in.

One of the acts of the Hain, at a period of their history, was to set out to populate planets throughout the Galaxy. That’s why there are so many human or humanoid groups out there: two legs, two arms, two eyes and so forth, though sometimes with certain modifications. The Hain introduced those changes, perhaps to adapt a group more fully to its particular environment, but sometimes apparently on no more than a whim – “let’s try this model here”.

So Genly Ai, a native of Earth, is on a planet being contacted for the first time by the Ekumen: Gethen. He is alone, because mobiles – those whose role it is to travel to other planets, as opposed to stabiles who stay behind and manage communications with the mobiles and the associated worlds – always go alone onto a new planet.

The first news from the Ekumen on any world is spoken by one voice, one man present in the flesh, present and alone. He may be killed… yet the practice is kept, because it works. One voice speaking truth is a greater force that fleets of armies, given time; plenty of time; but time is the thing that the Ekumen has plenty of…

However, Genly Ai hasn’t simply made contact with Gethen. He has made contact with just one of the nations of Gethen – unlike so many science fiction novels, where planets speak with one voice, Gethen is still in that primitive state of development where it is divided into nations competing for primacy. So Genly is visiting Karhide, one of the two most powerful nations of the planet. It is run on something like feudal lines, with a king and nobles though far more technologically advanced than feudalism was on Earth. Karhide is the rival of Orgoreyn, the other major power among the many nations of this strange world, in turn run on collectivist lines by a government with seriously autocratic leanings.

But Genly describes the world as strange. Part of that strangeness lies in something else he said – that it was in its Ice Age. Indeed, those who first identified the planet nicknamed it ‘Winter’. Life is only possible in a narrow strip on either side of the Equator; north and south of it, ice extending from the poles presses down threateningly on the peoples making their living in the cold.

Nor is the climate the only strangeness. For Winter was one of those planets where the Hain indulged their taste for playfulness. Gethenians have no gender most of the time; only for a short period each month do they become fertile and, as result, each member of a couple will develop opposite sexual organs allowing procreation – with no rule governing which will adopt which sex. This means than any individual Gethenian can be man or woman at different times, and can father children or give birth to them.

The tragedy of the king of Karhide, for instance, is that while he has fathered heirs, he has never been a mother – he has no heir of his own body.

Karhide, Orgoreyn and above all the ice, which has a major role to play in The Left Hand of Darkness, provide the setting for a gripping, truthful, insightful novel even though it is a fantasy creation, a work of science fiction. And the unusual bi-sexual population, where personality inevitably has no gender-specific features, provides a mesmerising cast of characters to populate it.

Why do I talk about all this now? Because The Left Hand of Darkness is an extraordinary work that shows how much finer science fiction or fantasy can be than many critics allow. As Margaret Atwood, herself a towering figure among today’s writers, it is the creation of “one of the literary greats of the 20th century”. Alongside, among many others, outstanding books such as The Dispossessed, Four Ways to Forgiveness or the series aimed at children but eminently readable by adults, the Earthsea novels.

Just a few of her outstanding novels

Their creator, Ursual le Guin, died on 22 January at the age of 88. She leaves an immense gap in the world of fine and compelling novels, as did Terry Pratchett when he went. The idea that we shall have nothing more from her pen is painful, just as painful as my realisation that I would no longer have my autumn brightened up each year by the arrival of a new Pratchett novel.

Those of us who know her work will miss her. And if you don’t know her work, well, remember it isn’t just me telling you – even Margaret Atwood thinks Le Guin’s outstanding. So, what are you waiting for?

Looking forward in the spirit of Pratchett

There are, it has been said, two types of people in the world. There are those who, when presented with a glass that is exactly half full, say: this glass is half full. And then there are those who say: this glass is half empty.

The world belongs, however, to those who can look at the glass and say: What's up with this glass? Excuse me? Excuse me? This is my glass? I don't think so. My glass was full! And it was a bigger glass!

And at the other end of the bar the world is full of the other type of person, who has a broken glass, or a glass that has been carelessly knocked over (usually by one of the people calling for a larger glass) or who had no glass at all, because he was at the back of the crowd and had failed to catch the barman's eye.

Ah, the voice of Terry Pratchett. Communicating truth through humour. Presenting through his imaginary Discworld a picture of our own planet, distorted only so far as its most essential characteristics have been blown up to make them unmissable. Appealing characteristics as well as blemishes, even if there are more of the latter,

Since the superb yearly gift of a new Pratchett novel has now come to its fatal end, re-reading is now my only option. I’m laughing my way through The Truth at the moment, with its insightful treatment of the role and development of the press. But nothing in it outshines the glass-half-full quotation. And it just seems to become more and more apposite.

Another Pratchett novel, living up to its title

I was particularly struck by it when I read a post from a friend calling for sympathy for those, like doctors or petrol station attendants, who have to keep working through Christmas days while so many of us are enjoying time with our families. That reminded me of a young woman I met, thirty years ago, at a supermarket checkout on New Year’s day. Her looks betrayed her state, and when I put it to her she readily admitted that she was badly hungover from the night before. Even so, she was determined to do ten hours of work on that public holiday, because she was being paid triple time. Recently married, she and her husband were busily saving for a house purchase.

UK overtime payments have declined steadily since those days. Partly, this reflects a decrease in the number of overtime hours worked, which may well be a good thing but, anecdotally at least, I’m coming across increasing numbers of people being asked to work overtime for no raised level of payment, or indeed only for time off in lieu. The woman with the hangover might not, today, find that working on New Year’s day was quite as remunerative as it was thirty years ago.

This may be one of the reasons why the British Social Attitudes survey has found that, where 74% of people in 1986 would have recommended to a newly-married couple that they buy a house as soon as possible, the percentage had fallen to 53% in 2012. Britain is regressing towards an older dispensation in which home ownership was a privilege of the few, not a right of the many.

It’s no surprise to discover that the High Pay Commission finds that the remuneration of Chief Executives of our biggest companies is set to grow from 145 times the average salary in 2010 to 214 by 2020. It seems that the owners of the large glasses that are never full enough, are seeing their share growing even more starkly than before; meanwhile, at the other end of the bar, there are more and more people finding it difficult to catch the barman’s eye.

It all sounds pretty hopeless. Fortunately, there is a glimmer at least of optimism still. Labour has a new leader, Jeremy Corbyn, who is infuriating a lot of large-glass holders by refusing to stop speaking out, with energy and determination, for those with small glasses or no glass at all. Among those he infuriates are the supporters of the now old-fashioned “New Labour” school. When they ran the party, they were, as Peter Mandelson so aptly put it, “intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich.” They were, unfortunately, just as relaxed about many others remaining filthy poor.

Their replacement offers a chance that we might be able to deal with the empty glasses. Perhaps that’s no bad note on which to end the year in which Pratchett left us, and prepare to push forward in his spirit in 2016.

A museum and a tribute to a fine man and entertainer

He went out in style, Terry Pratchett. After announcing his early onset Alzheimer’s in 2007, he spent his last eight years fighting the disease, both through contributions to the search for a cure or by publicising the nature and effects of the disease, and by refusing to let it throw him off his work as a chronicler of the Discworld (that flat world, carried on the backs of four elephants, riding in turn through the cosmos on the shell of the great turtle A’tuin.)

Technically, Pratchett died on 12 March this year. To me, though, he only really went after carrying out his final piece of magic, on 27 August, when I woke up to find his last novel, The Shepherd’s Crown, had blossomed on my Kindle overnight. A touch of pure Discworld witchcraft, that, or perhaps wizardry, the wizards being the ones that went for science and technology, while the witches concentrated on far more practical matters (a recurring theme in The Shepherd’s Crown is the witch’s duty of clipping the preternaturally tough toenails of old men.)

Pratchett developed some extraordinary characters: Vetinari, the Patrician of Ankh Morpork, Captain, later Commander, Vimes of the watch in that great city, Corporal, later Captain, Carrot of the same august body.

Three of his finest have to be the witches Granny Weatherwax, Nanny Ogg and the one he presented to us last, Tiffany Aching. All his characters have many fine qualities, but I don’t think it unfair to say that Tiffany is the most delightful. In The Shepherd’s Crown we say goodbye to her, to Granny Weatherwax and to Nanny Ogg, and that closing door brought home to me that I would at last have to say goodbye to Pratchett too.

Previous novels of his I’ve read with the warm sense that it was “the latest.” For this one, I had to cope with the bitter feeling that it was “the last.”

Today, my wife Danielle and I went down to Luton’s Wardown Park because, in the Museum there, a performance was going to be given by Nakisha Esnard (never heard of her? I think you might in the future: combining poetry and music, dynamically, wittily and powerfully).

But the museum also brought me face to face with Terry Pratchett again. It is running an exhibition of works by Paul Kidby, who illustrated many Pratchett novels.

Checkmort: Kidby after Bergman in a tribute to Pratchett

Another great Pratchett character is Death – well, many others have used the character, not least Ingmar Bergman in The Seventh Seal, a fact of which Kidby is clearly aware – but Pratchett gave him a special twist (“Death comes to us all. When he came to Mort, he offered him a job.”). Kidby neatly expresses the sense of the game we lost against Death when Pratchett went, in a Bergmanesque and prescient picture, painted four years ago.

But I was also delighted to find Tiffany again, having only just said goodbye to her. There she was, with her pointy hat, the essential badge of the witch, the brim inhabited by Nac Mac Feegles, her ubiquitous companions and protectors.

Tiffany with her badge of office, the pointy hat
And a detachment of Nac Mac Feegles

It was good to see you, Tiffany. And Pratchett, indeed. Even Death, come to that, though I can’t help feeling a certain resentment at him for stopping the flow of these beguiling tales.

Pratchett’s Death would have given us something richer than Pratchett’s death.

Terry Pratchett lives on

“Tell me, captain…” the Patrician of the city of Ankh Morpork asks his newly appointed police captain, someone who is known to bear certain birth marks and to have an uncanny way of inspiring loyalty in his fellow citizens, to the extent that some have recognised in him a King returned to his city after centuries of absence, “this business about there being an heir to the throne… What do you think about it?”

“I don’t think about it, sir. That’s all sword-in-a-stone nonsense. Kings don’t come out of nowhere, waving a sword and putting everything right. Everyone knows that.”

Why, indeed, should we be that excited by the prospect of the King returning? What’s so wonderful about Kings? Charles I? He drove us so crazy we actually took his head off. Henry VIII? A tyrant whose reign so nearly 2000 executions a year, one in every 1500 people. Charles III, hovering int he wings? Hardly tyrannical, but hardly inspirational either.

That’s what Terry Pratchett did so well, in more than achieving the programme he outlined to BBC’s Desert Island Discs in 1997: “I think I write – I hope I write – entertaining books that are good value for money.” Did I say achieving? He hugely overachieved it.

Terry Pratchett: educating and charming us
Sadly gone, but his voice and laughter live on

In that same interview he explained how he’d come to write the Discworld novels, as parodies of fantasy which questioned the very assumptions of fantasy writers – actually, we’re not that keen on the return of the King, Tolkien – but far more fundamentally put our own lives, back here on Earth, under the microscope.

I wrote it as an antidote to what I call the “belike he will wax wroth” school of fantasy. At that time, there was a lot of fantasy written by the people who had been influenced by the people who had been influenced by the people who had been influenced by Tolkien. And it was getting a little bit silly and everything was recursive and everything was feeding off itself and I just decided to create a world which was clearly ridiculous, designed to look ridiculous, but make certain the people reacted like people do in the twentieth century. That automatically became funny because they didn’t react like cliche fantasy characters, they had ideas of their own. Much to my surprise, what started off as a parody of fantasy became a fantasy series in its own right.

The exchange I quoted above, between the newly promoted Captain Carrot and Havelock Vetinari, Patrician, comes from the end of Men At Arms, one of my many favourites in the series. A little earlier, Carrot in his earnest enthusiasm for police work in the city, had expressed it rather neatly to Vetinari:

‘Do you know where the word “policeman” comes from? It means “man of the city”, sir. From the old word polis.’

‘Yes. I do know,’ replies the Patrician, who knows as much as Pratchett about words, and a lot more than Carrot.

Indeed, he makes the point himself at the end of their interview, calling Carrot back as he is about to leave the room.

‘You’re a man interested in words, captain. I’d just invite you to consider something your predecessor never fully grasped.’

‘Sir?’

‘Have you ever wondered where the word “politician” comes from?’

It does all us citizens no harm occasionally to remember that ultimately politicians and policemen are men of our city. However much, and however often, they may disappoint us.

Pratchett’s way of teaching such lessons without didacticism, and with a witty smile, appeared even in books ostensibly aimed at children. For instance, I shall wear Midnight.

I’m suspicious of the notion of evil. But the world today seems to be suffering from a level of cruelty it’s hard to call anything else. At its most extreme there’s the cruelty in action of ISIS, ritually beheading or burning its victims, even using a child to shoot one.

There is however a more indistinct kind of evil, a greyer cruelty, usually expressed in words (though who knows when it might turn to deeds). It’s embodied by such as Jeremy Clarkson believing himself entitled to bully anyone who irritates him; more seriously, it’s expressed by parties of the hard right (or even the ostensibly more moderate right) who casually inflict suffering on others not for what they’ve done, but for who they are: lone parents, gays, immigrants, the disabled, the ill.

Sadly, there are those who line up with the perpetrators of this evil. Jihadi John in Syria. The hundreds of thousands who backed Clarkson, preferring entertainment to the rights of employees not to be assaulted by a star. The millions who put their weight, and their votes, behind UKIP.

“… there are those,” writes Pratchett in I shall wear Midnight, “who would rather be behind evil than in front of it.”

True in the Discworld, and just as true on Earth. Pratchett’s answer is that of his central character, Tiffany Aching. When the moment comes in the novel that she lays down what needs to happen next, she even manages to get her audience laughing.

“That’s good, Tiffany thought; laughter helps things slide into the thinking.”

That’s Terry Pratchett. He has us laughing. And that slides things into our thinking. Things that need to be there.

Yesterday, a tweet appeared in Terry Pratchett’s account. It was from his own Discworld character, Death, who always speaks in capitals.

"AT LAST, SIR TERRY, WE MUST WALK TOGETHER."

A petition has been launched to ask Death to let us have Pratchett back. Well, it’s sadly unlikely to succeed. But at least his voice rings on among us. And for that, amid laughter rather than tears, we can be grateful.

Fiction and lies; good and bad

One of the more curious quirks of the human mind is the way we distinguish between lies and fiction.

We know fiction is untrue. We expect it to be untrue. We don’t want it to be true. In fact, there’s even a psychological mechanism, suspension of disbelief, that allows us to enjoy the untrue narrative we’re reading or watching, because at one level we believe it – we get into the story – while at another we know perfectly well that it’s impossible to believe.

This even leads to curious paradoxes, such as our rejection of inappropriate actions by fictional beings. In Lord of the Rings, for instance, if Sauron had decided that his behaviour was reprehensible, chosen to retire, backing Aragorn for King and handing over the keys to Dark Tower to Gandalf before heading for a small cottage by Lake Nurnen, we might have had trouble going along with the narrative. 

Sauron may be a fictional character, but we understand how he should behave, and that isn’t it.

Sauron's lidless eye.  "This dark lording fair takes it out of you.
Time to put my feet up. Fancy a cuppa?"
 I don't think so.

Just to add a further twist, as we know what to expect from certain fictions, a good writer can achieve comic effect by making a character behave against nature. 

Terry Pratchett has a vampire character, Otto von Chriek, who has taken the pledge and forsworn the drinking of blood (the “b-vord”, in his Germanic accent, as he prefers to call it). Otto proudly wears the black ribbon of vampires who are on the wagon. To distract him from his addiction, he has become a photographer, which is awkward since vampires can’t handle bright light. He therefore carries a small phial of animal blood around his neck, so if his flash causes him to turn into a pile of dust, it will break and let the blood out to reconstitute him.

Layers upon layers, you see. There are no vampires, but we know how vampires should be; we know that light turns them into a pile of dust; we know it only takes a drop of blood on that dust for them to resuscitate; because Pratchett has stuck to these conventional characteristics of the vampire, he can take liberties with others and create a wonderful comic figure for us.

So fiction may not be true, but it does have rules. Which is perhaps what distinguishes it from simple lying.

Those rules are particularly strict when it comes to historical novels. The basic events described have to be as accurate as possible. The best exponents of this genre therefore put a lot of effort into making sure they are as well informed as they can be, given what’s known about the period in which they set their book. Hilary Mantel’s books about Thomas Cromwell are compelling not just because they are a fine telling of a gripping story, but because we know she’s gone out of her way to get the factual basis right. Of course we realise that she can’t possibly know what Cromwell said to Henry VIII in private, or how he felt about his wife and family, but we allow Mantel licence in that area – we suspend disbelief – because she’s so rigorous elsewhere.

The same is true of Robert Harris’s An Officer and a Spy, a masterly novel on the Dreyfus affair and its finest figure, Colonel Georges Piquart. If you haven’t read it, read it soon: it’s a great and enthralling piece of fiction supported by fact.

Then, however, we get another kind of writing which is far less honourable. The kind that claims the same kind of adherence to fact as Mantel and Harris espouse, but fails to live up to it.

“All rituals, science, artwork, and monuments in this novel are real,” claims Dan Brown at the beginning of The Da Vinci Code. And then proceeds to lay before us a stream of undiluted tripe. The Priory of Sion was a secret society founded in 1099, he claims, when in fact it was a hoax set up in 1956. There are 666 panes in the Louvre pyramid, the number of beast, according to Brown; in reality, there are 673. Extraordinarily, at one point his characters take the London tube at Temple station, to travel to King’s College, London. Which is right next to Temple tube. No other station is closer.

The Da Vinci code's claim to factual advice
doesn't stop it being unadulterated drivel

This isn’t playing with the rules of a genre, as Pratchett does, it’s flouting them. You make a Mantel type claim about respect for fact, and then deliberately break it.

To me that no longer feels like fiction. It’s simply lying. And I’ve had nothing but contempt for Brown since I realised that’s what he’d done.

Why am I talking about this now? Because something came up the other day to remind me of this particular kind of lie.

We recently watched the 1996 film Fargo and the series of the same name that was spun off from it. Each episode of the series starts with a claim that echoes the one made at the start of the film:

This is a true story. The events depicted took place in Minnesota in 2006. At the request of the survivors, the names have been changed. Out of respect for the dead, the rest has been told exactly as it occurred.

That’s rubbish. The events are completely fictional. Fargo’s claims are just as false as The Da Vinci Code’s. Which is infuriating. 

However, what infuriates me is not that I can’t forgive the creators of Fargo for being so free and easy with the distinction between fiction and lying, but because I can’t write them off for it as I did Dan Brown.

And why can’t I feel as ill-disposed towards them?

Because Fargo’s good. And The Da Vinci Code’s drivel.

Fargo. Outstanding. A lie's a small price to pay

Ultimately, that’s the reality. Fiction? Lies? The only distinction which matters is quality. If it’s well put together, fiction can be forgiven anything, even if it strays over the boundary into falsehood.

Fargo’s good enough. But Dan Brown never wrote sufficiently well to merit that kind of indulgence.

Time for the best witches

Had a great e-mail a couple of days ago, from a friend who had a generous, warm-hearted and much-appreciated New Year message for us. 

But the subject line was ‘Best witches for 2014’.

Now this is obviously just another case of the wonderful, mysterious workings of predictive text or auto-correction.

It created a problem for the woman who texted her boyfriend, ‘Screw the gym! I'm getting pregnant tonight!' He replied that they ought to discuss the matter first. She had to explain that her actual intention was to get some Pringles for the evening.

Pringles: may make you fat if taken instead of the gym,
but they don't usually lead to childbirth

Equally, the text message ‘I’m going to stay home and eat a slave’ didn’t refer to a return to one of the darkest periods of our history, abducting Africans from their homes to be transported in bondage to the Americas, and compounding the horror with cannibalism, but merely to a desire to stay home and have a salad.

Nor was it best to reply to text question ‘Do I look like a cow?’ with the answer ‘Moo’, especially if what was meant was ‘Noooooo’.

Still, it struck me that some good witches wouldn’t go at all amiss in 2014. After all, we’ve had plenty of bad ones in the past. Last year, Maggie Thatcher passed away and a humorous if slightly malicious group of her opponents set out to organise sufficient downloads of the song ‘Ding Dong the Witch is Dead’ from The Wizard of Oz, to make it to number one in the charts. And came damn close...

Not all the bad witches have been female. One thinks of Tony Blair, looking us all in they eye and telling us he was a fundamentally straight sort of guy, and then contributing to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis on the basis of false (if not falsified) intelligence. Or of Rupert Murdoch, casting his spells and weaving his webs of deceit, through control of more and more of the communications media.

So some of the best witches, or even just some better ones, would be most welcome in 2014. Perhaps Terry Pratchett’s Granny Weatherwax and Nanny Ogg would be a good move. They’re a bit infuriating, wandering around sticking their noses into anything they choose without asking whether it’s even their business, but they’re always well-intentioned and the results are usually pretty good.

Granny Weatherwax and Nanny Ogg
Not always welcome but they generally do some

Our governments are just as infuriating when it comes to interfering in things where they’re not needed – such as gay relationships or abortion rights – and their intentions wouldn’t usually stand much scrutiny, while the results are generally mediocre to lousy.

Best witches for 2014? Yes, I’d be in favour. So let me pass on my friend’s best wishes, and hope you all enjoy the very best of witches in the the coming year.

A privilege to plead guilty to this charge

Isn’t it glorious when you face an accusation so flagrantly true that you can frankly find no answer for it?

Many years ago when I was in my twenties I hadn’t yet developed the strict moral standards I now uphold as a respectable member of the community. This led to my being accused on one occasion of being a ‘fucking little Communist Jew’. The person who made the accusation was upset by certain activities I had been engaging in, with the full and indeed enthusiastic consent of the woman involved, on the grounds that he was related to her, though only by marriage. ‘Little’ is a failing I’ve always had and never found any way of remedying. A Communist I most certainly wasn’t, but I knew that my accuser was so far out to the right of the British political spectrum that he would hardly have made the distinction between my mildly left-wing brand of social democracy and the views of Stalin, so I gave him the benefit of the doubt. Finally, a Jew I have always been, at least by blood – something that came as part of my inheritance, like the littleness.

So I found it difficult to come up with any kind of answer to the accusation. Just what part of it could I legitimately challenge?

The other week I faced another of those unanswerable accusations, though I’m glad to say on a very different subject.

‘I’d have to suspect you just don’t like privilege,’ I was told, by a good friend who happens to support the Conservative Party – living proof that some nice people can bring themselves to back the nasty party. The tone was one of reluctance, as though the allegation was so shameful that it was difficult for a friend to voice it. 

What could I say? ‘Privilege’, as Terry Pratchett points out, is a word derived from roots that mean private law and, yes, I loathe the idea of private law. If law is to make sense at all, it has to be public and to apply to everyone. I profoundly loathe the idea that some people should be above it, or worse still, should be able to make their own.

Pratchett - right on privilege as he is on so many things

In fact, it slightly shocked me that anyone could imply that it might be possible to like privilege. I thought that practically everyone despised it, except perhaps those who enjoyed it, and even they, if they had any conscience at all, felt a little shamefaced about it.

Of course my friend didn’t really mean privilege. I was actually being charged with disliking wealth. Now that's not right. I have no problem with people enjoying wealth. Someone can drive a better, or at least more expensive, car than I can? They can take better, or more expensive, holidays? They can eat at better, or more expensive, restaurants? Welcome to it. If you’ve got the money, go ahead and spend it.

But – you have money so you can buy better healthcare than the inhabitants of those neighbourhoods of Glasgow where life expectancy is 54? You have money that will buy your kids a better education than the inhabitants of those miserable neighbourhoods that burst into flames in this summer’s looting in England? You have money that open doors to you and your family that will remain closed to others?

Well then, yes, wealth is buying private law. And then, yes, guilty as charged – I’m not keen, not keen at all.

The offence isn’t as much fun as the one I had to confess to in my twenties. But it is at least a tad more principled.

Haggling over the price

The best jokes are the ones that provide an insight into some real-life problem. It may not be immediately obvious how the one below does that, but bear with me – it makes a really good point about one of the more attractive aspects of business life.

A man approaches a woman at a party.

‘Would you spend the night with me for £10,000?’ he asks.

‘£10,000?’ she says, reflectively, ‘yes, I think I would.’

‘Good,’ he says, ‘and would you spend the night with me for £10?’

‘£10?’ she cries, shocked, ‘what sort of woman do you think I am?’

‘We’ve established that,’ he replies, ‘now we’re just negotiating the price.’

Yes, bells can start ringing when the only thing left is to negotiate the price. This week at work, we took a new order. That is a matter of celebration in itself – I know from depressing personal experience what it’s like to work in a company where it’s a rare event. But I was pleased rather than delighted, because the real celebration came two weeks ago when the customer told us ‘we can’t pay that much.’

That was it. They were negotiating the price. We didn’t have to sell them the product any more, we didn’t have to persuade them of the advantage of taking ours rather than a competitor’s, we didn’t even have to persuade them that they had nothing to gain by putting off the decision for another few months (believe me, in the NHS, that’s not at all unusual). All that was left was to agree a figure. And when you’ve got that far, why, you’re practically home.


And as a postscript, more on humour and insight, the Pratchett way

At his best

Have you read Terry Pratchett’s I shall wear midnight? A real jewel for Pratchett fans. In my opinion one of his best.

(Which reminds me: why do people say ‘in my humble opinion’? Is anyone ever likely to say ‘in my arrogant opinion’? Or is it just that by passing it off as humble, they reckon they can get an arrogant one past their listeners?)

When we get going on an important job but haven't completed it yet, we all sometimes say that we’ve taken a good first step. In this novel, Pratchett asks what comes next – and answers, not a second step but another first step.

That’s so right. If you want to do a job well, make each step on the way a first step. Second steps are about as much use as second chances – and if you need a second chance, you’re in bad shape already.

And I've got the scars to prove that one too.