We hate making a mistake over a writer’s name in a Ways With Words programme. They hate it even more so we try to be very careful. We check with publishers, Google, Amazon – but sometimes they get it wrong, which means we do. And sometimes we are just careless – or tired I prefer to say.
“ How did we do that?” we moan and groan when the programme comes back from the printer and the mistake that we’d overlooked, despite many checks, leaps from the page to taunt us.
This year’s cast of characters has been sent to trip us up. How come we have a Guy Watson and a Gay Watson on the same programme? The first is Riverford Farm Organic boxes, the second happiness and Buddhism. Just one vowel separates their names but if I mix them up the audience may need to find happiness in carrots or meditate over a lettuce.
Simon Barron and Michael Baron are just trying to be difficult. Who has the double R? Is it Simon the folk singer or Michael the bat poet? Oh no! We have succeeded 50% of the time. When Michael is doing his bat poems we have given him one R in his surname. Correct. When he is leading a bat walk we have been more generous with the Rs – incorrect.
Kate Mosse, the best selling author of ‘Labyrinth’, becomes the model if we leave off the E. Even without having a surname like a plant I bet some people come to the event expecting to hear about the catwalk.
We almost have a football team of Jonathons and Jonathans this year to test us.
Alexander Waugh is chairing The Daily Telegraph’s balloon debate. I’ve met Alexander many times. I find him witty, charming, clever. He is a big favourite of mine but I could easily slip a generation or two and call him by his grandfather’s name (Evelyn) or his father’s name (Auberon). It’s not helped by the fact he looks so like them both.
Waugh - Alexander, Auberon or Evelyn?
Shakespeare thinks it doesn’t matter.
“That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet”, he says.
However if he was coming to the festival and I called him Wilf Shakespear I bet he would soon stop mentioning roses.
But we can guarantee that whatever we call the writers at Ways With Words they are all as fragrant as Mary Archer.
Useful Information
Note the date Saturday 19 July – 8pm, Great Hall at Ways With Words if you want to come and see Alexander Waugh pilot his imaginary balloon up to the firmament while the panellists argue for a favourite writer’s right to remain in the basket.
I wonder who Andrew Davies, Carmen Callil, Philip Hensher will champion?
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