The diary of a writer-publisher: 37

23 March 2026
Ten days after jotting down the first lines, I type up some verses entitled ‘The Europeans 2019’. I’ve long wanted to write something like it, as a joke, and various recent events triggered it. If you recall, 2019 fell in the agonized hiatus between the EU referendum (2016) and its result being ratified by Parliament (2020) — a period that included the resignation of two Tory prime ministers and the election of Boris Johnson to Get Brexit Done. Passions about the EU ran higher than ever. Some of our intelligentsia ascribed the Leave vote to sheer xenophobia. Equally, though, I felt there were Remainers who suffered from oikophobia, i.e. a hatred of their own oikos (home/culture). I knew a few. They were exponents of the Oo-la-la school of xenophilia who were hooked on European travel, food, drink, climate, beaches, tourist sights etc. Essentially they were voting for their own hedonism. I couldn’t resist opening with a riff on Betjeman’s ‘How To Get On In Society’:

Pull on your driving gloves, Gordon,
Light up your Billiard pipe!
Edge out and I’ll slam shut the garage:
We’re off to the civilized life!
In two hours we’ll be down at Dover,
This Bentley’s not going near Fife!

The couple call at Cap Gris-Nez, Paris and Cagnes, indulging their appetites on the way, then flit to Venice. The last four lines read:

Ugh! Why must we always go ‘home’?

He kicked their old Bentley, clenched pipe,
and they crawled through the boneyard of Europe
back to Brexit, and Bojo, and gravy.

If this light verse is published somewhere, I will post it on Calderonia (if there is a demand!). Lest I should be accused of xenophobia myself, I remind subscribers that I voted Remain. I’ve experienced a dozen European countries, however, and genuinely do regard Greater Europe as a boneyard of wars, betrayals and bad governance.

2 April
Everyone in the area these days seems to have a dog, if not two, so I decided we should keep up with the Joneses and acquire this one:

Poor chap, he had been put in front of a neighbour’s house for anyone to take, but no child or parent wanted him. Finally I saw him out in the rain and decided I must rescue him. The owner told me he is nearly a hundred years old, but stuffed with sawdust, so no charity shop would take him (H&S). I identified the breed as Clumber Spaniel, which a few days later won Top Dog at Crufts. I am considering walking him every morning to get the paper, as he has wheels and a convenient handle at the back. Apparently he was called Rufus, but now he is Woofus. Wonderfully low maintenance, of course, and no vet bills.

11 April
When does ‘early 2026’ end..? My book of twenty short stories is announced for then, and I even have a feeling that sometime last year I said it would be out in the autumn. Will I never learn just to keep my mouth shut? But I know it’s a common disease of writers, missing their own publication deadlines… The suspense must be killing you out there.

Some good has come of it, though, for me at least. GOAT1 (as I must call myself after the rebranding of Sam&Sam) took almost a year to write the last story in the book (9700 words), as its subject matter and style were a new and uncertain departure. So it was finally finally finally finished in February 2026. The rest was ready to go and GOAT2 got straight down to typesetting the book in March, with all the added efficiency of his now eight years’ experience since typesetting George Calderon. A problem soon coagulated: I thought it was going to be about 185 pages, I certainly didn’t want it to hit 200 pages, but it is running at over 250. This is partly because we are having to put in some blank pages so that all the stories start on a recto (right hand page), and partly because we are very committed to an easily legible font size. But what to do about the total length?

Having to address this has proved a very positive thing. You see, I had always thought of this as a short book of stories, because there would be at least one more book of them in the future. But the problem led me to see the current book differently. The twenty stories it contains date from 1967 to 2026 (a few early published ones were rejected), but…I literally have no more stories in my head. I hadn’t been aware of this myself. But I think it’s true. So The White Bow/Ghoune is in effect my ‘collected stories’, basta! In that context, it doesn’t seem s-o pretentious sticking to recto starts and coming in at 250+ pages.

ETA now is mid-May. Would you say that is still early 2026? Watch this space, of course.

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SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS 

‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement

‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine

‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian

‘This comprehensive, meticulously researched and highly readable biography, which the author describes as a “story” rather than an academic biography…’  Michael Pursglove, East-West Review

‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter

‘The book is written with great assurance and the reader always feels in safe hands. I liked the idea of it being a story and I read it the same way I would read a novel.’ Harvey Pitcher, writer

‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18

A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.