• Food

Then there’s the food. Penny and I now rarely eat meat and never chicken or turkey: but I do like a slow-cooked leg of lamb every twelve months or so. Toby and Mike will eat anything; Dom is vegetarian; Allie is vegan. Already that’s up to three different dishes for our six-handed feast some time after Christmas.

Shopping from about now until the first week on January is a nightmare. I’m of the generation that grew up when banks shut at three, cash points barely existed and shops closed on Christmas Eve, usually with empty shelves, and didn’t seem to open again until about the middle of January. If you didn’t stock up with huge amounts of food and cash beforehand, you were screwed.

This atavistic fear starts kicking in about now. The Tesco in Hungerford has become noticeably busier this week which suggests others feel the same way. The fact that I normally go shopping after having swum puts me in a position of peril as regards impulse buys. There’s suddenly more stuff on the shelves that I could ever want or need.

Maybe it would better if I went back to 1970s mode and went out armed only with a tenner and pretend that plastic money didn’t exist. Mind you, I’d probably crack and end up shoplifting.

It’s also increasingly difficult to buy staples like cheese or bread at this time of year which don’t have bits of something else in them. Each year, the added ingredients seem more peculiar. Cranberries, apricots, walnut, brandy-soaked cherries…what will be next? Fish fingers? Maltesers? Cat food? As for mulled wine, a bottle of which I nearly bought yesterday instead of some honest plonk, that should be used as lavatory cleaner or to fuel the furnaces of Hades.

I suppose some people like these things. However, I wonder how many of us buy them out of a sense of duty. More worrying is how many of them, on being found to be awful, are thrown away. It’s like dates in their little oval box: who likes them? And yet the following year we’ve forgotten and buy the same stuff all over again.

• Books

I said there were things dominating my thoughts this week. For dramatic effect, I put much the less important one first. The real thing that’s been on my mind is the launch of Penny Post’s second book, Gravity and Rust. This contains twenty-two of my short stories, parodies and tales of personal mishap.

The first thing I want to say is that I’d like you all to buy it. The link above gives you all the information you should need.

Writing it is the fun and easy part. Producing it a fiddly process but luckily I spent a lot of time working in print production so it doesn’t faze me too much. The nightmare really comes when you start to try to sell it.

If you have a publisher, they take care of this but you might get only ten per cent of the sales. If you publish it yourself, you might keep two-thirds of the money but have to a hell of a lot of work. In most cases, there’s little overlap between the skills needed to write something and those needed to flog it.

We have a lot of advantages. We have the medium of Penny Post to help spread the word. We have three very supportive local independent bookshops in Hungerford, Marlborough and Wantage. We have a Waterstones in Newbury. I have a fairly good knowledge of how the book trade works (though, as I’m about to relate, not enough). We have a very supportive distributor with which I’ve worked for years. We have…

Hang on, I hear you say: what’s a distributor?

It’s a company that holds your stock, takes and fulfil orders, invoices them, collects the money, deal with returns and pays you what they get for your titles less about fifteen percent for this service. If this sounds like a lot, try doing it yourself.

• Big beasts

Then there are wholesalers: or rather, the wholesaler – Gardners. There was a second, Bertrams, until about six years ago. There were fears in the industry that Gardners’ monopoly would lead to predatory practices. To the company’s great credit, it seems to have behaved exceedingly well. It kept its supply chains going during Covid, without which almost every bookshop would have folded.

It remains the beating heart of the trade. You go into your local shop at half-past three and order a perhaps obscure but in-print title and the chances are Gardners will have got it there for you to collect before lunch the following day.

An upside of this monopoly is that there’s only one wholesaler to deal with. A major downside is that if for any reason your title isn’t listed on its system, despite seemingly having followed all the procedures, you’re out in the cold. This is what I’ve spent the last couple of days grappling with.

Then there’s Waterstones, the country’s only remaining large chain. Like Gardners and other big companies, there’s no easy way of contacting a human. The problem here was a question about order delivery times. When I finally broke through the communication wall, Liv at the Newbury branch and Peter at HQ were delightful. However, there’s no easy route in.

There’s still the question, to which I’ve received different answers, as to whether Waterstones can order through Gardners (in my experience over the last fifteen years they have a hot-cold-hot relationship at roughly eighteen-month cycles: inevitable, probably between two big beasts). If Waterstones can’t order from Gardners then all dealings with Waterstones’ are controlled by its Hub in Burton-upon-Trent.

No one you can speak to at Waterstones seems to have any more control over this than they do over the movement of the planets. In all the years I’ve been dealing with the chain, the Hub has existed for most of them as a mysterious and implacable force, subject to its own capricious rules. I have sometimes wondered if anyone in HQ is fully in control of it or whether it’s become sentient and autonomous, run by AI.

• Gods

Every industry has its big beasts, its implacable systems and its impersonal hubs. The whole world is dominated by about twenty companies whose turnover dwarfs that of most countries, and certainly those of Gardners and Waterstones. If you want to have a human chat with these two, you can do it if you’re prepared to tough it out. The same goes for companies like Mailchimp with which we deal for the Penny Post emails.

With Google, Facebook, Apple and the rest of the Olympic pantheon, forget it. The best you can do is slaughter a goat, roast it in a temple and hope for the best.

This might be a good way of looking at them. The ancient Greeks believed in a hierarchy of deities, the top layer of which was subject to all the normal human failings of lust, envy, power, revenge and the rest. Alliances between them would be made and broken. Taking on the gods and trying to cheat or out-perform them always ended badly – just ask Prometheus. That was the way things were. People just had to put up with it. There were benefits in compliance but the downsides were far worse. Obey or die was the basic message.

It doesn’t seem to me that we’ve moved much on from this. The level of power that large corporations – not to mention governments, which in this country at least are fairly benign – wield over us is akin to that which Homer was writing about three thousand years ago. These gods are now really among is, exerting a measurable effect on our behaviour in a way that Hera, Zeus, Apollo and Aphrodite never really did.

Like all wise gods, they provide benefits as long as we pay our dues. If we don’t, we’re excluded. This will only intensify. All these gods have effective monopolies. Not all of them will use them as benevolently as has Gardners, the book distributor I mentioned above.

Viewed in this light, my grapplings with the UK book trade seem a moderately fair contest. I may not win but at least I might get the lower-level deities of Waterstones and Gardners to explain how I can propitiate them. With the real big beasts, there’s no chance. You just have to have faith, pay, pray and toe the line…

• Trump Trumps

A reminder that, much like Trump’s second term, the Trump Trumps card game has returned for a second edition. Featuring four new transgressions, the game offers players an updated opportunity to pit the many misdeeds of the world’s most successful felon against each other.

Was eating KFC with a knife and fork more vile than inciting an insurrection? Did blowing up suspected Venezuelan drug boats cause more chaos than denying climate change? Find out by clicking here and claiming a 10% discount for Penny Post subscribers by using the code PPTRUMPS10 when prompted.

• Twenty-two stories

Did I mention this before? Just in case you skimmed over the earlier but, we’ve recently published Gravity and Rust, a collection of twenty-two of my stories and parodies. Obviously, I think that, like the above-mentioned Trump Trumps, it’s a pretty damned perfect Christmas gift. If you’re minded to agree then it’s available from any bookshop.

For more information, including a summary of what’s in it, a couple of brief reviews and the ISBN number, please click here.

• The CIL nightmare

The fight for justice in the community infrastructure levy (CIL) scandal continues. This article in The Guildford Dragon refers to the ongoing spat. Our own West Berkshire Council, to its enormous credit, solved this awful injustice over eighteen months ago.

The main offender currently remains Waverley in Surrey. (there are others) which maintains that any retreat is legally impossible. In that case, why hasn’t West Berkshire been had up before the beak?

The Dragon quotes local MP Jeremy Hunt as saying that “at our most recent meeting Minister Pennycook [the Minister] confirmed that Waverley’s actions were not in line with the intention of CIL regulations – and that the law is being changed, he hoped, in the New Year 2026. The minister also confirmed that he had great sympathy with those hit.”

The legislation is flawed and the actions that some councils have taken is immoral: end of. They know that. if they don’t, there’s something wrong with them. How can the members sleep at night?

A (sort of) whimsical point remains. The two worst offenders were West Berkshire Council (now resolved) and now Waverley Borough Council (very much ongoing). Do you see the the similarity? Both known locally as WBC. But surely that can’t be the only connection? There must surely be something that links the policies of West Berkshire then and of Waverley now. What or who on earth could it be? Are they like two entangled quantum particles, mirroring each other’s actions at long distance; or is there some other explanation?

• And finally…

• The BBC reports that “tourists from dozens of countries including the UK could be asked to provide a five-year social-media history as a condition of entry to the United States, under a new proposal unveiled by American officials.” I can’t even begin to work out out how this could be interpreted, given some of the volumes involved. Were I to go to the USA mine would be zero as I don’t engage on it (it WhatsApp doesn’t count). Wouldn’t social-media silence itself be regarded as suspicious? Fortunately, I have no plans to visit the place.

• The arguments about the abolition of the right to jury trials for crimes carrying a sentence of three or more years (currently it’s six months) continues. Oddly to some, The Week recently reported that The Guardian felt that this was a good move but Micheal Gove that it was a bad one.

We’re all entitled to our views: just so long as we remember that the backlog was really caused by the government before Covid in a desperate attempt to improve its cash-flow, as we considered here. Everything that’s happening now is a desperate expedient to solve a self-inflicted problem, not the application of a major point of principle.

• Don’t ask me what’s happening with the Ukraine peace deal, which seems to be going round in circles. Trump has added petrol to the fire by saying that European leaders are “weak”. I’m not quite sure what he expects the EU and the UK to do: cave in to Putin or invade Russia? Meanwhile the Kremlin Krocodile continues to run rings around everyone. He’ll get what awe wants from this and then, after a short break, he’ll go after a bit more.

• Just as there are big corporate beasts (see above), there are big nations. Few are currently as ruthless as China. Between Russia’s military aggression, the USA’s passive aggression and China’s commercial aggression, the liberals of Western Europe seems to stand little chance. Orwell, once again, may have been right: three world powers in shifting alliances with each other in a permanent and uneasy balance of terror.

As regards China’s commercial dominance, the Financial Times, quoted in The Week, asked “what do we in the West have to exchange with China? ‘Nothing’, is the awful truth.”

• 20mph zones have been much in the news recently with many councils, including West Berkshire, looking to roll these out to other communities. This article on the BBC website is worth a read on the subject. It looks at speed-awareness courses (which the author recently had to attend) and the psychology of speeding.

The article sits one expert as saying that you get into a “flow state” when driving. The activity needs to be “enough of a challenge to engage us, but not too much of a challenge to stress us out.” For some, 20mph seems too slow to accomplish this. It would seem that when we’re at the wheel, part of our brain feels that we’re playing a game.

• After considering the gloomy state of the world –and I haven’t even mentioned climate change – it can often seem like a pleasure to look at the world of sport on, as it were, the back page of this part of the column. No such escapism presents itself this week. The English clubs, the Arse in particular, are doing well enough in Europe: but the real problem is the Ashes in Australia. If it’s OK with you, I’d prefer not to say anything more about this series at the moment…

Across the area

• Social housing

• Design awards

The Newbury Society has launched the West Berkshire Architectural Design Award. Entries are welcome from any projects of any size in West Berkshire that have been completed within the last three years. Entries must be in by 28 February and the judging panel will include lay people as well as retired architects.

“The new award aims to foster a higher standard of design, inspiring builders, architects, and homeowners to create structures that are not only functional but also visually appealing and genuinely enhance the surrounding environment,” Chris Marriage Chairman of The Newbury Society said. “The Society is seeking designs that demonstrate thoughtful integration with the landscape, innovative use of materials, and a commitment to improving our lived experience.”

“We believe that good architectural design has a profound impact on the quality of life in our community,” added Garry Poulson, Principal of the Design Award scheme. “This award is designed to shine a light on the best work being done in West Berkshire and to encourage everyone involved in building projects to aim for excellence.”

The Newbury Society believes that by formally recognising outstanding architectural achievements, it can “help create a more attractive, interesting, and sustainable built environment for all residents of West Berkshire.”

For more information, click here.

News from your local councils