April 30th 2009

Zipperty do dah, zipperty hay. My, oh my, what a wonderful day. This is the day my latest book, WILD ABOUT HARRY, my 13th Detective Inspector Angel story is being published. It also marks the winner of the competition for the best entry of a celebrity, over 80, who is still regularly working. I have had so many entries that I feel I should give more than one prize, but I’m not going to.

As a late entry, the queen has come up with Pete Seeger, who is 90 on May 3rd, and is playing in a huge concert in the US on that day to celebrate. I can add it to the list, but I can’t award the prize to her, can I? It would be a right twist. Besides the house is full of books. She has a free entitlement to a half interest in any book in the place. In fact, she has a half interest in everything in the house. She says that her solicitor told her so!

So the winner I have chosen is Simon Wellman from Leeds who submitted the name of Nicholas Parsons who is an amazing 85. Simon! A signed copy of WILD ABOUT HARRY, is on its way to you, with many thanks.

There were older celebrities submitted by you lovely people, but they had been already suggested by Alan Titchmarsh, or the celebrities were not British, and I thought the competition should have been confined to Brits, although I didn’t say so, (with apologies to my readers in the US and elsewhere). I do hope you think that I have been fair.

The complete and amazing list of celebrities, believed to be over 80 and regularly working, submitted by reader's of this column is…

Betty Turpin 88 years
Peter Sallis 88 years
Liz Smith 87 years
Dora Bryan 85 years
Robert Hardy 84 years
Angela Lansbury 83 years
Jean Alexander 83 years
Geoffrey Palmer 82 years
June Brown 82 years
Bruce Forsyth 81 years
David Attenborough 83
David Jacobs 82
Lauren Bacall 85
Honor Blackman 81 or 82
Andy Williams 81
Sir Jimmy Savile 82
Les Paul 93
B B King 83
Leslie Phillips 85
June Whitfield 83
Nicholas Parsons 85
Pete Seeger 89

Well, it’s been a lot of fun and quite revealing to find so many lovely old people still working, but the competition is, sadly, closed.

About something entirely different …

Can I let off a bit of steam?
My car insurance is coming up for renewal, and it’s £36 dearer than last year. I don’t like prices going up like that. I haven’t had an accident or anything.
Well, you know those heavily advertised comparison websites, where you submit the details of your car and the drivers and so on, and they automatically come up with cheaper insurance offers? In some of their ads, I’ve heard grinning actors say, ‘I saved £170.’ ‘I saved £200.’ ‘I saved £90.’
Well, I spent 20 minutes submitting all the details of the car, the queen, the house, my marital status, my occupation, my age, my sex, even told them what side of the bed I sleep on, and the result was two quotes … one, £126 more than my present insurer and the other £180 more. Then I phoned two other famous high street names directly for a quote and both were also dearer, so needless to say, I re-insured with my present insurer. Well, what would you have done?
But that was about an hour’s writing time lost by their persistent (and in my case, wasted) advertising.
In that one hour, I could have written about five paragraphs of my new Angel book, deleted four of them and pruned the other down to two sentences. And tomorrow morning, I could condense those two sentences into one, and then tomorrow night, if those sentences were full of unnecessary description, I could delete them, because nobody reads description anymore.

How I ever finish writing a book, I’ll never know.

Come back soon for more ramblings from of an old writer.