RECOLLECTIONS FROM A RAGBAG MIND

conversations, most of which I’d rather forget, and I don’t get paid for.

At the time Forsyth shunned technology, preferring a portable typewriter. And no Smartphone. Maybe he’s now succumbed to the tech onslaught and bought a computer, but the lesson stuck: the mechanism is irrelevant, and the best English was produced with a quill pen. (And a multi-million-dollar camera a brilliant photographer does not make). Technology has given us something else; thousands of ‘published authors’ whose inspiration is based upon a single bad idea, a laptop and thesaurus.

Aspire to become an author? With the help of Grammarly and Spellcheck write 100,000 words, shovel them into sentences, hire a cheap graphics bloke to design a book, then give it to Amazon. They’ll print-on-demand as the orders flood in – from your relatives, the same folk who wrote the glowing reviews. Hey, why make it hard communicating with annoying literary agents, the rigour of editors and the ludicrous demands of politically correct publishers? Why risk rejection and the venom of critics in a system designed to make you feel worthless via a gauntlet of pathological pedants? Forsyth did it the hard way, at first, until he could mention an idea over lunch and receive an advance cheque in the mail the next day.

As for my niche memory, eight years of 1,200-word freelance columns for the South China Morning Post were hand-written in a couple of chaotic hours, followed by the antediluvian process of typing by my secretary who sent them via fax to the editor. This while I was being nagged (and paid) by corporate clients to do anything but amuse half the city and offend the rest.

ARE YOU SELF-CENSORING?

Frederick Forsyth, famed author of The Jackal. and The Odessa File books and movies, turns 85 in August which will be of interest to no one. I mention it because I once interviewed him by phone and vividly remember that one hour… because I had to: my recorder crashed, leaving me with scribbled notes I couldn’t decipher.

But I discovered I could recall most of it and wrote the piece with supreme confidence as I awaited an audition on American Idol and a scholarship to Oxford. The downside of the knack for remembering entire conversations is that… I can remember entire

It dawned on me recently that these hurried half a million words were mostly from memory. No internet or a library nearby, just the rapid retrieval of bits from my ragbag brain. After a certain age we don’t have memories, memories have us. And if most of these uninvited images are a bit depressing and poisoned by regret, they are as hard to switch off as the good ones are to illuminate.

Like Google, something else didn’t exist back then: the absurdity of political correctness. While I have little interest in revisiting old material, I recall enough to know most of it wouldn’t get printed today. (And if it did, it would have to be savagely rehashed so as not to offend… anyone.) The difference between then and now is that no one suffered because of Sherwood’s Sunday rants, and today society suspects they will. In eight years my editor never changed a word. His name? I can’t remember.

Peter Sherwood has lived in DB for 20+ years. The former head of an international public relations firm, he is the author of 15 books and has written around 400 satirical columns for the South China Morning Post.