I, Partridge - Alan Partridge [90]
It’s safe to say that my maverick tactics caused quite a few sleepless nights over at WHSHQ (WH Smith HQ). They were petrified I was going to snaffle their customers. It’s not that they came over to have a word, it’s that they didn’t. They tried to act like it didn’t bother them. And in many ways I thought that was much more revealing.
I may have resembled a market trader, but in fact I was a bookshop without walls. And they knew it. The only thing they had over me was that I didn’t do snacks, mags, chocs and pop. Although I was giving away a free Danko torch with every sale. And I know which I’d rather have. If the power goes while I’m tucked up in bed with a good book, I’m hardly going to be able to keep reading using a bag of Revels. No further questions, your honour.
I remember the first book I sold to a WH Smith customer. He was a man by the name of Warren. Before he’d been sucked into my sales tractor beam, he’d been innocently copying out a recipe for white bean stew from the BBC Good Food magazine. Yet within minutes he was writing me a cheque, £8.99 poorer but one very good book richer. And I remember that I did use those exact words.
It might seem weird that I remember the name of a man who bought a book from me almost 15 years ago, but in my defence he did have a lisp. Not that I realised at first. I thought he was just being silly. But the more I chatted to him, the clearer it became. There were no two ways about it – this man had a disabled mouth. Out of interest, I enquired if it entitled him to a badge for his car. It didn’t. Justice? Not in this world, mate.
Good on him, though. He could have stayed at home, resenting his impediment, a cut-out of a big letter ‘s’ on his dartboard. But no. Here he was, bold as brass, out and about. He may not have been able to say the word ‘sausages’. (Or the word ‘say’, come to think of it.) But nothing – and I mean nothing – was going to stop him getting the 10.02 to Newmarket from platform nine. If memory serves, he needed a new Ethernet cable from PC World – something, he noted with a wry smile, that he could ask for safe in the knowledge that everyone involved would remain bone-dry.
And besides, if he did suddenly get a craving for sausages on his way back, he could simply bob into Morrison’s and get them from the chill cabinets. He’d never actually have to say the ‘s’ word. Unless he was insistent on buying direct from a butcher.208 In which case, just point. I know for a fact that’s what Mike Tyson does on his weekly shop. It’s either him or Toyah Wilcox anyway.
No, I liked this guy. As I pretended to have an itchy cheek so I could wipe another fleck of his spittle from my face, I understood that we all have our crosses to bear. His just happened to be a chubby tongue. It was incredible to think that the letter ‘s’, such a simple concept to even the youngest of children, was like a foreign country to this man. It was the enemy in a lifelong war his mouth was never going to win. Like a kind of oral IRA (pre-ceasefire).
Before he left he was good enough to take a photo of me, for posterity (see picture section). Sadly though, my one-man station-based sales frenzy only delayed the inevitable. Alas and alack (Roget’s again), I had failed. I started to sense something might be wrong when I received an email entitled ‘Bouncing Back is going to be pulped’. My god, this couldn’t be real. What was being proposed was nothing short of literary genocide.
I picked up the phone to Henry Chesney, my contact at the publishing company.
‘Henry, there has to be some sort of mistake here.’
‘There’s no mistake.’
‘Damn you, man, we can turn this round! I know we can.’
‘We’re not doing a raft of nationwide TV adverts, Alan.’
‘Okay then, a stunt. We’ll make a house out of a thousand copies of Bouncing Back. Then bequeath it to the homeless. We’ll be on the front page of every paper in the land (of Norwich). Though the structure may lose rigidity if it