littorally

Computer says no

When my dad died earlier this year, the Department for Work and Pensions paid my mum one last instalment of his pension which they later had to reclaim once the notification had gone through. Fair enough. Mum repaid the money.

Last week, another letter arrived from them. 58 pence was still outstanding on the over-payment. Could they have it back please?  We had a laugh about the ridiculousness of it all (for US readers, that’s a dollar and 14 cents, at today’s exchange rate, so will probably be about 2 dollars tomorrow, ho ho).

Then yesterday, yet another letter arrived. This one was chasing the non-payment of the 58 pence they had only asked us for a whole three working days earlier.

By this point, the postage the DWP had spent in one week on letters was more than the debt they were trying to recover.

I phoned them up today and a rather embarrassed woman told me that the 58p had been written off, but that the letters couldn’t be helped because the ‘computer produced them automatically’. I politely suggested that perhaps someone could change ‘the computer’ so it didn’t chase recently-widowed elderly people for stupidly small sums of money that the DWP were writing off anyway, and that it would be even better if they didn’t send recently-widowed elderly people two debt-chasing letters within a week, as that’s just plain nasty and harassing and they should be ashamed of themselves. Felt very sorry for the woman on the phone - what a way to earn a living, justifying that kind of crap.

Sale to Hitchcock’s

Concentrating on novel-length stuff means that I’ve been doing very little with short stories in the last year, so it was good news to hear this weekend that Hitchcock’s have bought my story ‘A Walk In The Park’.

And in the news today…

If you find yourself writing about a human tragedy like this, and right after you have quoted a sad statement from the dead girl’s family you go on to drop into the article what the fucking property prices are in the street where it happened, it’s time to step away from the keyboard for a few moments before the last of your soul is sucked away.

And in other news, police arrest boy for having the word cult on a placard. No, that’s not a typo. Well done, City of London police. Keeping the city safe from words.

Lessons learned, noir, and a new start

Dave Zeltserman’s running a series of articles on his blog, Lessons Learned From The Trenches, about everything he’s learned in the sixteen years since he started taking writing seriously. Congratulations too to Dave on the news that the French house Rivages have made an offer for Small Crimes.

Elsewhere, Peter at the ever-interesting Detectives Beyond Borders is asking his readers what they talk about when they talk about noir.

And here…well, after six months of frustration and blank sheets of paper, one morning of inspiration and frantic scribbling has come up with the plan for the next novel. The amusing thing is, it’s nothing like any of the ideas that I was playing with, it’s not even in the same genre. But who cares.

Not the Faraway Tree, then.

Fly the Easydrug routes to The Flat Country…but don’t upset the people from The Faraway Place. An interesting article from the Guardian about the falling out between the Liverpool mafia and the Colombian Cali cartel. I particularly liked the policeman’s statement that angering the Cali cartel was ‘unwise’. You don’t say.

The price of coffee? 150 lashes

I’ve just posted an article over on the Wearside Amnesty blog, about a man sentenced to 150 lashes and months in prison for the crime of…meeting a woman in a coffee shop. And to think, this is the country that we allow to blackmail the UK into dropping a criminal investigation because we might embarrass one of their princes.