Anyway, it looks like the age old curse has risen its grisly head once more -- whenever Billingham and MacBride get together, disaster follows! Well, maybe not all the time, but certainly more often than not. So far Mr B and I have been engaged for a total of 5 bookshop events -- and only two of them actually happened. Yes, that's the reason I'm still here at Casa MacBride, rather than sitting in a train, heading of to Cambridge: both tonight and tomorrow night's events have been cancelled. Oh, it's Bromsgrove all over again...
This has to be more than a coincidence. It has to be a conspiracy! I blame the Monarchy, clearly they have it in for sexy, bearded write-ists. After all, do any of them have a beard? No! Not one! Not so much as an apologetic goatee, or a shameful moustache. I'll bet they don't even have eyebrows -- those get edited onto their photos afterwards, by their evil hairless minions. This is all part of the royal family's secret anti-facial hair policy, designed to rebuild the Empire so they may once more rule the globe with an iron fist!
Or maybe it's just because people decided they had better things to do on a Tuesday and Wednesday night than come see a top-notch crime writer and his giggling, bearded, Scottish sidekick?
Or maybe it's because deep down, we all know that Mr B sacrifices goats on his ungodly alter accompanied by the wailing of the damned, the baying of the wolves, the clarion cry of the horns of war... on a weeknight when people are trying to sleep.Whichever it is (and I'm still leaning towards the monarchist conspiracy -- Price Phillip's a shifty bugger after all, with all his hats and pointy teeth) I'm not going nowhere no how. At least not until that thing in Hamilton Town House Library. And as Mark 'Biscuity Goodness' Billingham won't be there, I can only assume it's not going to be cancelled at the last minute.
The man's a jinx, I tells ya, a jinx!