There’s a very nice piece about Michael Moorcock on the New Statesman
website, by Andrew Harrison who went to Paris to interview Moorcock and writes,“Before travelling to Paris, I’d asked if there was anything that
Moorcock misses from home that I could smuggle in for him. It transpires that
the French capital is well stocked with tea bags and Branston pickle. You have
not lived until you have presented one of your literary heroes with the
contraband he truly desires: four luxury pork pies.”
I can well believe that’s true. And frankly (and I mean this as no criticism)
Mr. Moorcock doesn’t look like a man who’s denied himself many pork pies.
I’ve meet Moorcock a couple of
times though I’m absolutely certain he wouldn’t know who I am. The first time was in the early 1980s when I
was working at the Words & Music bookshop in the Charing Cross Road in
London, and he came for a signing.
Apparently it had been a long time since he’d last done a signing and
the fans were out in numbers, many of them carrying bags and holdalls and even suitcases
full of Moorcock books.
In order to make the task go more smoothly the
bookshop had supplied him with two bottles of
red wine. As I recall they were
litre bottles, but I may be misremembering that. In any case he sat at a table for several
hours and signed everything put in front of him. Between each signature he took a sip of wine,
small enough in itself, but nevertheless by the end of the session he’d
polished off both bottles, and was showing no signs of being even slightly
tiddly.
The picture above is from 1970, which I found on the
website dragonpage.com. And no, I have
no idea who the other people around that table are. Still, there’s only one bottle of wine, nobody
has a glass, and it really doesn’t look as though Mr. Moorcock’s in the mood
for sharing.
The New Statesman piece is here:
If you're one of the 600 million people who access BBC iPlayer via a proxy, there was a neat, short Moorcock interview on Front Row which can be found here: http://t.co/i0hFLcAwnQ
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