It all started when I was promoting a new book - I forget which - and my publisher rang to ask if I fancied being sold into slavery in the tabloids. The idea was that we'd offer a free guitar lesson as part of a massive music promotion The Sun was running. I agreed, despite not exactly being a fan of The Sun or any of its orbiting planetabloids. I mean, I stopped reading newspapers when Murdoch bought The Times, don'tcha know?
Anyhow, the competition was run - I believe people had to save the ring pull tops from Coke or Pepsi cans and send them in - and so I guess the tabloids could be held responsible for rotting teeth as well as fragile young minds. And I was their willing accomplice... oh, the shame.
Naturally I bought a copy of the paper just to see what they said about me. No matter how I feel about them, a kindly word or three from a national newspaper is always worth appending to the ol' CV, after all.
In the end, I think they damned me with faint praise by publishing some lukewarm comment about the book I has just written and so, alas, my CV is still unadorned by national rag-praise.
Somebody obviously donated copious quantities of ring pull tops as there was a winning bid for my 'free lesson'. So my publisher called once again and gave me the lucky fellow's name and address - only problem was that he lived in the South East and I live in the South West and so there was the obstacle of distance to overcome. In the end, I received no reply to my email to him and so the prize was left unclaimed - maybe he needed the travel expenses to pay his dentist bills instead.
It wasn't the weirdest experience I've had as a writer, but certainly one of the more bizarre...
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