...what it
might be like to be a young black mother in the white / male dominated fiefdom
of the UK capital of the North in the 1980s / 90s?
I may be able to tell you.
In yet
another departure from my global apocalypse ramblings, I have done battle with
my IT demons and produced my first straight-to-e-book book in a literary
experiment that cost me at least half a dozen more grey hairs.
Albeit that
I piddled about with the text post proof-read, introducing new typos AND that
the process of uploading the damn thing – which should have taken 20 minutes -
took me three days.... it is done. And it is available. And here is the
obligatory blurb.
‘Maybe I’m not a Pigeon !’
(My Lives & Me in Ten Houses)
by Amanda Baker
In 1988 the capital of the North elected its
first black woman councillor. Now, after a stint in law (without much order)
she has produced this genre bending, humorous, sortofanautobiography. Bizarre memoirs
wrestle for space with amusing anecdotes. Painful revelations, apocalyptic
short stories, satirical blog posts, flash fiction and other extracts from her
published writing are marshalled to serve up this appetizing offering.
WARNING
You may get dizzy as you ricochet from a
creepy encounter with pre PM Tony Blair wearing can-you-really-walk-in-those
tight trousers to a near death toilet experience. Hang on as you are flung from
hitchhiking with a ginger tom cat on a lead, to accidentally becoming a stand
up comedian via child~prefers~pear~to~Nelson~Mandela shame.
There is love, loss, and a house
renovation that makes Grand Design look like a Lego project, finally splat
landing in the congealed spaghetti of the fostering process. All in an off the
map literary mashup from this mixed-race, mixed up, Brown Girl Outside the Ring.
“...it was the shape of things to come. I’d
been elected to Newcastle City Council despite having no political aspiration.
In the future I was to be a finalist in a national BBC sitcom writing competition
despite not owning a television, a quarter-finalist and finalist in two
separate national Stand-Up-Comedy competitions, despite not being a comedian.
In 2014 I voted SNP in the referendum even though I am neither a Nationalist
nor a Scot.
The
thing is never to let logic get in the way of the unexplored path...”
Welcome.