Play nicely Martin

There must, as they say, be something in the water. First we have two football bods being rude about female match officials, then Jeremy Clarkson and his droogs mocking Mexicans and now Martin ‘son of Kingsley’ Amis has had a go at children’s authors. You may have missed the last. It was in a TV interview with Sebastian ‘literary writer’ Faulks in the course of which Amis fils stated that he would require to be ‘brain-damaged’ before he could write a book for children.

What is it about children’s books that so irritate Britain’s intelligentsia? I assume it has something to do with Harry Potter being so successful but I don’t remember Roald Dahl getting it in the neck in this way. He would be criticised for being too dark or otherwise unsuitable, but I cannot recall anyone saying that he must have suffered some kind of mental collapse between writing all those ‘tales of the much as we expected’ (as Peter Cook called them) and James & The Giant Peach.

As always when one of these attacks on children’s books pops up, I am reminded of Philip Pullman, a writer who, as a friend once said about Derek Jarman’s films, I don’t really like but I’m very glad he’s there. His reply to someone’s query as to when he was going to start writing grown-up books was to comment that an equivalent was to ask a paediatrician when they were going to start doing grown-up medicine. He also once smugly noted that when the Dark Materials trilogy, which deals with the existence of God and the role of religion amongst other things, was top of the children’s best-selling charts, the best-selling adult’s novel was Does My Bum Look Big In This?.

Which is nice.

There Will Be Platelets

It comes of having a Y chromosome I suppose, but I am inordinately pleased to discover that I have enough platelets in my blood stream to be a possible platelet donor. Not everyone has. And it’s better than that, not only do you have to have enough platelets to spare, you have to have the right blood type and furthermore have ‘rigid and raised’ veins. The latter sadly really does bring out the Jeremy Clarkson in me as a friend discovered when I boasted loudly of having them while she was browsing in Topshop. Mind you, she ought to be used to this. I once announced loudly in Fenwicks that I’m partial to Polish sausage. Well, in these hard times you have to carry on, don’t you.

Actually, I’m not there yet. While my veins are ready and willing and my platelets are so numerous they’re in danger of seceding from the red corpuscles, I still on the day have to have a high enough pulse and a low enough blood pressure. So I may yet have to endure the ignominy and blow to my self-esteem of not actually being able to give away any of the teeming platelets however much I may wish to.

Wish me luck.