Doris Leadbetter

If it is a truism that every person has a novel in them, then it is equally hackneyed to suggest that every doctor/lawyer/vicar has a fund of entertaining anecdotes waiting for retirement from public life to allow the leisure for setting them down on paper. Yet we can all recall with pleasure a few such collections of stories. They are not, perhaps, all that well written. They certainly have no place in the millstream of contemporary literature, busily recycling fashions in style and content, and establishing new paradigms for those who follow breathlessly to admire and adopt. Nevertheless, a small book of anecdotal, humorous tales can be just the ticket when you won’t a book that won’t, thank you very much, stretch your mind.

There’s a lot to be said for plain writing for writing in such a way that the reader is nudged along through nuance and observation to perception. Plain writing tends to make the reader feel as if they too are watching impassively what the writer sees. It’s a little like standing in shallow water, not noticing the tide coming in. Plain writing involves the reader; any shocks, or passions, come from within the story not from the use of highly coloured words or manipulative tricks.

There used to be a saying: Penny plain; twopence coloured. It came from the sale of cardboard prints in a London toyshop. The uncoloured prints were considered inferior, less exciting. They left too much to the imagination.