September Song

It's a long, long way to December

Petroc Trelawney on Radio 3’s Breakfast Show this morning played Lotte Lenya singing ‘September Song’, which is like hearing the first cuckoo of the year. But in reverse. It’s been hot this week in the UK but today is grey and there are yellow lime leaves on the decking outside my window. The seasons are turning and Christmas is coming.

Contain yourselves.

I’d been holding off this newsletter because I was hoping to announce that we’d started recording this year’s story. Jon was supposed to be coming down to the distant suburbs last Saturday and I had especially adapted the recording booth to fit in my garden office (which resulted in several trips to Screwfix and a good deal of fiddling with bits of pipe). Sadly it was not to be.

I had some minor oral surgery last week and there were some gory complications Friday evening which meant I spent at least some of the earliest bits of Saturday morning in Accident and Emergency. This was not as fun as listening to Jon doing silly voices, I can tell you.

Anyway, everything seems fine now, thank you, and hopefully we can actually start in September. It’s always nice to have plenty of time to edit and finesse so both of us can actually relax and enjoy Christmas like normal people.

In the meantime, I’ve been considering a separate plan for the Christmas Stories.

One thing I haven’t really ever looked into previously is publishing the stories as books, either physically or as e-books, or, probably, both. They’re obviously written to be read, by Jon specifically, but I also started writing them because I couldn’t find anything suitably Christmassy to read that fitted my tastes, and given the thousands of people who listen to the podcast, I wonder if I may not be alone.

So first of all a quick question:

It’d be useful to know what you think.

Of course, once I started thinking about this, I got carried away and got as far as designing possible covers, which I shall reveal after the paywall.