Neil Hanson's Blog

I've been on an intermittent book tour since the start of August but, barring a couple of "outliers" next year, I reach the end of it on Thursday and Friday (12 and 13 November) with the last two dates. The first is where it all began - the story if not the book tour - with a date at Britain's highest inn, www.tanhillinn.com, where I'm looking forward to renewing some old acquaintances and making some new ones back in the inn I managed in the 1970s and owned in the 1980s. I'll be talking about the new book, natch, http://www.amazon.co.uk/Pigs-Might-Fl... and also showing the iconic Everest double glazing commercial filmed at the inn 30 years ago and - for the first time in 30 years - the BBC documentary about our first few months when we took over the inn. Set in thousands of acres of wild moorland, it has built a reputation as a bit of a quirky, left-field music venue these days. There are no neighbours to complain about the noise since, apart from sheep and grouse, there aren't any neighbours at all until you get four miles away! Bands who've already appeared there include British Sea Power and The Arctic Monkeys - there's something particularly appealing about a band who can fill the biggest stadiums playing at a venue that only holds 100-200 people - and the day after my gig there on Thursday, Scouting For Girls are playing there: from the ridiculous to the sublime in 24 hours! Then I'm back on home turf the following day for The Last Night of the Poms (G'day Australia) at The Wheatley Arms in Ben Rhydding, Ilkley, www.wheatleyarms.co.uk (n.b. this isn't a plug, because it's already sold out). I sometimes question whether book tours make any sense for anyone, apart from the superstar authors that everyone wants to see, butI've really enjoyed this one and feel it's been very worthwhile. I've sold some books, of course, but the real joy has been in escaping the tyranny of the word processor every few days and connecting with readers and a few other authors. So thanks to everyone who turned up and to those who didn't: next time for sure!

If you're out and about in Yorkshire over the next few weeks and want to know more about Pigs Might Fly or The Inn At The Top, you'll find me at the following venues, on the following dates.

PIGS MIGHT FLY EVENTS:
Monday 17 August, 7.30pm. Talk, Q&A and book signing. Knaresborough feva, Knaresborough Library, Market Place, Knaresborough, HG5 8AG, Tickets £5 from Knaresborough Tourist Information Centre or www.feva.info
 
Saturday 5 September, 11am-1pm. Book signing. White Rose Book Cafe, 79-81 Market Place, Thirsk, YO7 1ET. Tel: 01845 524353
 
Wednesday 9 September, 12.30pm-2pm. Book signing. Waterstones, 102 High Street, Northallerton, DL7 8PP. Tel: 01609 761987
 
Thursday 10 September, 2.30pm-4.30pm. Book signing., J R Nicholls Bookseller & Publisher, 347b Wakefield Road, Denby Dale, HD8 8RT. Tel: 01484 866413
 
Saturday 12 September, 11am-2pm. Book signing. The Guisborough Bookshop Ltd, 4 Chaloner Street, Guisborough, TS14 6QD. Tel:01287 610179 books@guisboroughbookshop.com
 
Tuesday 15 September, 7.00pm. Talk, Q&A and book signing. Waterstone’s, 15 Coney Street, York YO1 9QL. Tel: 01904 620784. Tickets £2 available in store
 
Friday 18 September, 7.30pm. Talk, Q&A and book signing. Ripon Spa Hotel, Park Street, Ripon, HG4 2BU. Ripon International Festival event in association with the Little Ripon Bookshop. Tickets £8 (students £5) www.riponinternationalfestival.com Tel: 01765 603994
 
Saturday 19 September, 12 noon-2pm. Book signing. Castlegate Books, 13 Market Place, Knaresborough, HG5 8AL. info@castlegatebooks.com  Tel: 01423 862222
 
Friday 25 September, 7.30pm. Talk, Q&A and book signing. Richmond School Sixth Form Centre, Darlington Road, Richmond, N Yorks, DL10 7BQ. Richmond Walking and Book Festival event. Bar and Bookstall. Tickets £8 from Castle Hill Bookshop. Tel: 01748 824243 or www.booksandboots.org/book.html 
 
Saturday 26 September, 11am-1pm. Book signing. Philip Howard Books Ltd, 47 Street Lane, Leeds, LS8 1AP. Tel: 0113 2259797
 
Sunday 11 October, 7.00pm. “The Yorkshire Shepherdess and Flying Pigs” (joint event with Amanda Owen). Ryedale Book Festival, Milton Rooms, Market Place, Malton, YO17 7LX. Tickets £10 from http://ryedalebookfestival.com/whats-...

Wednesday 14 October, 7.30pm. Talk, Q&A, signing, Betty’s Café Tea Rooms, 32 The Grove, Ilkley, LS29 9EE (Ilkley Literature Festival Event).Tickets £35, including a two- course set meal and tea/coffee, from Bettys Café Tea Rooms. Tel: Ilkley 01943 608029

Friday 13th November, 7pm. Talk, Q&A and book signing. Wheatley Arms, Ben Rhydding, Ilkley, LS29 8PP. Tel: 01943 816496. In association with the Grove Bookshop.
 
Friday May 20th 2016, 7.30pm. Talk, Q&A and book signing. Dales Countryside Museum Station Yard Hawes DL8 3NT. Tickets/details: 01969 666210 hawes@yorkshiredales.org.uk dcm@yorkshiredales.org.uk

A really nice piece on "Pigs Might Fly" and the real life "Inn at the Top" (aka Tan Hill), filmed by Philip Chapman , was broadcast on BBC TV's Look North (the North-East and Cumbria version) last night. If you're quick you can catch it here till 7pm today (Thursday13th August)
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/...
It contains a few clips from a documentary made back in the 1980s when I owned the inn, and the frighteningly young-looking protagonist brought back memories of the daily struggle to start the generator and dropping down through a hole in a snow drift considerably taller than my six foot four inches, in search of the water pump. Happy days?! 

Gearing up for the launch of my new book Pigs Might Fly on Monday, the first self-published one I've been involved in, after more than fifty titles put out by the big trade publishers. It's been a steepish learning curve and has involved a lot of man-hours that may or may not pay off - only time and what's left of the book trade will tell... As any small- or self-publisher will tell you, distribution is always a major issue. Some feel they can distribute their books themselves and that does work if you don't mind doing some serious legwork and your book is specific to a particular region - "Inns of the Yorkshire Dales" or whatever. But if you're hoping for a national sale, you really do need a national distributor and you'll have to give up 60% or more of your cover price plus another 3% or so for wastage - lost or damaged copies in their warehouse. You'll also have to pay to deliver the books to that warehouse and pay for collection or destruction of any returns or overstocks, and they'll only pay you at least 30 days after they actually ship and invoice the books to retailers, so you might be waiting two or three months - or more - before you see any cold hard cash. However if you're a tiny publisher and you want to sell to Waterstones https://www.waterstones.com/, say, you'll have to do it through a distributor because, though shop managers have some discretion to buy local books, Waterstones nationally will only deal with major publishers and distributors and if you're tiny, that aint you. The choice is yours: there's Gardners www.gardners.com/, Bertrams https://www.bertrams.com/, and a score of others who will handle anything from straight distribution, through to sale and fulfilment including invoicing... but all of it comes at a price. Which you choose and how much of your potential workload you want to hive off to them is up to you, but - obviously - the more they do for you, the less of each book's sale price will find its way to your pocket. I've given my book to Gardners to distribute through the book trade, with a separate wholesaler supplying the gift trade, other than the network of small, non-book trade outlets around the Dales that I've built up myself over the past two years since The Inn at the Top was published. These tourist attractions, gift shops, Post Offices, cafes, pubs, B&Bs, camp-sites, etc, etc, stock signed copies of The Inn at the Top and Now Pigs Might Fly and sell pleasingly large numbers of them... only commercial confidentiality prevents me from telling you how many! Best of all, I get to spend a couple of days every month wandering round the Dales doing my delivery runs, and catching up with old friends from the days when I was running the famous (or should that be infamous?) inn there - what's not to like?

If you're at a loose end today and fancy a little trip "Oop Dale" you can catch one of the great Yorkshire experiences: the annual sheep show - the Swaledale sheep-breeders' World Cup - at the The Inn at the Top, aka Tan Hill. The usual country show clutter of craft and cake stalls is notable by its absence from Tan Hill. Rather than tourist trinkets, there are a handful of stalls selling wellies, foul weather gear, shepherds' crooks, veterinary products and farm supplies like "Two Gallons of Battle’s Summer Dip", "One Bag of Minerals", and "Five Litres Top Clip Worm Drench", but that's pretty much it apart from the pens of sheep and the men who breed them. If, to the untrained eye at least, the sheep look virtually indistinguishable from each other, all with peaty-coloured, off- white fleeces, black faces and white noses, the farmers - or at least the clothing they wear - tend to be just as identical, all clad in flat caps, tweed jackets, moleskin trousers, wellingtons and Barbour-type coats.

The sheep show at the inn might look homespun and unassuming, compared to the village shows elsewhere in the Yorkshire Dales, let alone the Great Yorkshire Show at Harrogate, or the Royal Show in the days when it was held every year, but as one farmer said to me, back in my days at the inn, ‘There are classes for our sheep at the Royal Show, but the winner there might not even get a ticket [an entry] to this show. This is where you’ll see the best tups and yows to be found anywhere.’

If the sheep don't tickle your fancy, the Lofthouse and Middlesmoor silver band from Nidderdale will be playing as they have since the very first show in 1951, when they happened to be passing on their way back from a concert elsewhere, and stopped to see what was going on. Inside the inn, the bar will be doing an absolutely roaring trade. If the weather's dry and the wind isn't howling over the "tops", get yourself a pint, perch up on the fellside and listen to the band playing the local anthem: "Beautiful Dale". When the last notes fade away, all you'll hear is the liquid song of the curlew, the gabbling calls of the grouse, the monotone piping of the golden plovers nesting among the tussocks of heather and the beautiful song of the lark raining down from the sky above you - only occasionally interrupted by the noise of the farmers arguing about the judges' choice of the supreme champion sheep. Enjoy!

This from my New Yorker best mate, Barry Fast, in today's NY Times Diary http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/201...

I was parking on the Upper East Side, on Second Avenue near 77th Street. I inserted my Visa card in the muni-meter. Nothing happened. Screen stayed blank.

I tried again. Nothing. Again nothing.

A waitress came out of a nearby restaurant and said: “Press the button for Spanish. This muni only works in Spanish.” I did not ask why and she didn’t offer an explanation. I hesitated. “Trust me,” she said, “it only works if you hit the Spanish button.”

I did not ask how she knew this. I thanked her and said, “Only in New York.” She laughed, “For sure.”

I pressed for Spanish. Inserted my card. The screen came alive and told me, in Spanish, to wait a minute and then to remove my card and press the blue button to add minutes. Then, in Spanish, to press the green button to print my receipt and, finally, to take the receipt.

The receipt was in English.

Spoiler alert: I watched a programme called Secret Britain on BBC TV the other night, mainly because it included a segment on The Inn at the Top, aka the Tan Hill Inn (http://www.tanhillinn.com/). However, the programme was one of the most excruciating “hours of my life I’ll never get back” that I’ve ever experienced. There were all the usual tropes of programme making 21st-century-style: say everything six times, use the same clips over and over, talk down to your audience, never hold any shot or topic for a more than a few seconds in case your low attention span audiences switches channels, convey breathless excitement at even the least exciting things, and, of course, have your presenters “amusingly” try their hands at all sorts of things because just showing us something without a hyper-active presenter in the foreground would be too dull to be true.
There were two presenters, one blonde, one redhead, one male, one female, and they can’t possibly be as dumb as they appeared to be in this program. Quite apart from the irritating way they…
kept finishing…
each other’s…
sentences… as if auditioning for the Whicker’s Island sketch on Monty Python, the script was so infantile that it would have embarrassed an eight year-old. As one of my customers in the Dales remarked to me the next day ‘I used to watch Blue Peter when I was young, and they had more respect for the intelligence of their audience than Secret Britain’.
The USP of the programme is that it is showing Secret Britain: things we never knew about our country. To emphasise this, the presenters had clearly been instructed to use the word “secret” every thirty seconds and everything was presented as a secret and a mystery to be solved even when it self-evidently was not.
The absolute nadir was reached when they arrived at the Tan Hill Inn. The blonde presenter told us that a clue to the secret of Tan Hill was hanging on the wall of the inn. It was a map of the old coal mines that used to surround the inn. After switching to another storyline for a few minutes - see previous comments about the perceived attention span of their audience - the blonde presenter went outside to investigate and - you’re not going to believe this - discovered that there actually used to be coal mines around Tan Hill!!!! Amazing!!!! as both presenters seems to say about everything, evidently not being articulate enough to think of another word. Sorry to spoil the secret for you.
After chewing the cushions, hiding behind the sofa and hurling abuse at the TV for forty minutes, I’d had enough and switched it off and I won’t be going back no matter how many “secrets” they promise to reveal. Lord Reith must be spinning so fast in his grave by now that he’s probably drilled his way down to Australia by now. If you don’t believe how awful Secret Britain is, and you’ve got some spare time you’ve no further use for, here’s the link: (http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/...)

I was up at the highest inn in Great Britain http://www.tanhillinn.com a couple of days ago and was delighted to find it in rude good health. It’s been through a couple of changes of management over the past year or so, not always with ideal results, but a new couple have now taken over the inn and the early signs are very promising.
The first thing that I noticed when I arrived is that the inn has not only been redecorated, but is also cleaner than it’s been in ages. The flagstone floors - dark grey shading into black on my last visit - have now been resorted to their original sandstone colour with all the accumulated dirt removed, and the rest of the pub has had a similarly vigorous clean up. The new owners are warm, friendly and welcoming, and seem to have the drive and enthusiasm to make Tan Hill again a top inn for more than mere reasons of altitude.
The weather was perfect too and when the skies are clear up there you feel like you can see forever, with the moors stretching away unbroken to the horizon. And if you pick a clear, moonless night to go up there, you’ll see an array of stars that is unequalled anywhere else in England. There’s no light pollution at Tan Hill and at 1732 feet ASL there’s a bit less atmosphere between you and the stars too. So you can see more stars than you can shake a shepherd’s crook at, including the Milky Way in all its glory and if you’re really lucky, you might also get a spectacular display of the Northern Lights; it only happens once or twice a year this far south of the Arctic Circle, but when it does it’s a jaw-dropper.

Back in the mists of time (okay, the 1980s) I edited five editions of the Campaign for Real Ale's (CAMRA http://www.camra.org.uk) Good Beer Guide and yesterday I went along to a reunion of the Campaign's "old and bold" from those halcyon days of yore. Although the pints of CAMRA's preferred product weren't being downed with quite the alacrity that would once have been the case, the years seemed to have been generally kind to the CAMRA Pioneers; perhaps the recommended number of units a week can be safely increased a little, after all! Apart from a little gentle nostalgia it did make me reflect on the astonishing success of the Campaign - and I claim no personal credit for it whatsoever, since the ground work had been well and truly laid well before I came on board.
Real Ale was going the way of the Great Auk and the Dodo when CAMRA was formed but the stubborn refusal of ordinary customers - people like us - to put up with the desecration of our pubs and the conversion of our national drink (no, not tea, the other one) into a over-carbonated, taste-free near-beer, forced the giant drinks conglomerates into a humiliating U-turn. It led to the rich and diverse brewing landscape we have to day, where almost every town seems to have its own small brewery. It's not all sunshine, lollipops and roses, of course, because pubs are still closing at an alarming rate, but as an example of the triumph of  consumer power, it has few equals anywhere in the world.
However, while celebrating that, I was forced to reflect on how sad it is that CAMRA's example has never led to similar consumer success in other areas of our national life. How much more pleasant would Britain be now if a "Campaign for Real Corner Shops" had had similar success in turning back the Tesco tide? Or a "Stuff Starbucks and kill Costa" campaign had given us a bit more diversity in our high street coffee shops? And don't even get me started on McDonalds…

Went to a Burns Night http://www.robertburns.org/suppers/di... this weekend - great time, though general overconsumption of whisky did turn the post-dinner Scottish country dancing into human dodgems. This year was my turn for the "Toast to the Lassies" and if anyone wants to save themselves some sweat and toil and make use of a variant of this at some future Burns Night, please help yourselves:

Those four lassies sitting there,
Three fab blondes and one dark hair.
Great at dance and disco-bopping,
First in line when corks are popping.

One’s a Geordie, one’s a Scot,
One’s from Yorkshire, one is not.
How we wooed them’s life’s big mystery,
Fit to write in Rabbie’s history.

One’s a model/fenestrater
One’s an agent of estater,
One, designer spas and saunas,
But for teeth you go to Lorna’s.

Three found one husband was enough,
But one is made of sterner stuff.
Having kicked one out of bed,
Cried “Notts wahey” and soon re-wed.

Bairns you’ve had between you plenty,
I’ve lost count but could be twenty.
We gave the sperm, then went out drinking, 
But not too much, if so you’re thinking.

Our bank accounts are all in debit, 
But all our children do you credit.
Although of course we claim the glory,
But that should be another story.

Rabbie would have loved you all,
Blonde or brunette, short or tall.
Rescued from the poet’s limbo,
Kilt a swirling, breeks akimbo,

After one too many toddies,
He’d be lusting for your bodies.
Bonnet doffing, sporran swinging,
On your iphones he’d be ringing.

And though he might forget your names,
He’d’ve had some Highland games.
Tossed his caber, stripped his willow
Had you lying on his pillow.

But once his lawless leg was over
He’d have found himself in clover.
He’d write a poem on your smile,
Social media, ancient style.

We four, unfit to sing your praises,
Gaze lovingly upon your faces.
However you define what class is,
There’s none so fine as these four lassies.