SIMON KELNER
June 10, 1998

Dear Simon Kelner,

I know my agent Gill Coleridge is in touch with Ian Birrell at the moment about my contract, and I am not writing to you about any of that – I am just getting in touch to say hello, and to utter a word of caution about the new placing of my column.

Until now it has been a landscape shape, broad and shallow, over five legs. This was a nice flexible shape, because it meant that if I adapted some format such as a Shakespearian pastiche or a bit of mock- ballad, the length of the verse line could easily be accommodated, sometimes by widening the column width and using only four columns.

If you are going to stick to this shape, narrow and upright, over two columns, you have lost this flexibility. There is a case in point today. At the end of my today’s column, I have a couple of speeches which lapse into blank verse. The sub or whoever handled it has been completely unable to accommodate it in the narrow space available to him, and has made the blank verse run on as if it were prose, which makes nonsense of it.
Now, I know that being able to handle Shakespearian pastiche is not the main preoccupation of a modern newspaper editor, but one of the things about a column like mine and one which readers seem to like, is the variation of format, which often gets right away from the ordinary succession of paragraphs into verse forms, dialogue, court proceedings, catalogues, etc. This is going to be much harder with the new, thin, upright column.

(While I am at it, I wonder if it would be a good idea to try and pull a quote out of my piece and blow it up as a big come-on? If I write something fictional, as I mostly do, there may be times when it looks a bit odd…

I just thought I’d add to your worries as the new editor. I’m not a trouble-maker, generally – I just wish I had been consulted before the new shape arrived, so that I could have made these points in advance.

Good luck!

yours from the depths of the country