As Rare as Rocking Horse Shit

Notes On Publication Day

Today is publication day of Floaters.

If you don’t know about the book you can read about it here in The Guardian.

Today, I want to do two quick things:

Firstly, an update…

Already, less than 25% of the super limited edition deluxe print run remains. Remember 50% of profits go to Surfers Against Sewage.

If you have interest, best make your move today.

There is literally one place on the internet you can buy Floaters, which is here.

To folk who have pre-ordered: THANK YOU.

Books have been signed, assigned their stretch of the Thames, and bagged up, and the post office will be tortured in the next few days, as you can see above.

And Secondly, a few words on the book’s title...

Floaters of course refers to the obvious💩- sewage in the water, which rightly has been huge news in the UK all week off the back of the Channel 4 series Dirty Business - but it also refers to the central relationship of the novel, which is an alliance between a disaffected teen boy and a radicalised boomer.

As a ten-year-old boy, I recall being off sick from school and reading the Roald Dahl* book Danny the Champion of the World and being absolutely thrilled that the adult characters - Danny’s father, Sergeant Samways, and Doc Spencer - colluded and indeed broke the law to thwart the arrogant landowner, Victor Hazell. The book made me feel like I’d been let into a secret - not all adults were killjoy enforcers.

I still have the actual copy of Danny that I read more than 40 years ago and it is not exaggerating things to say that it changed the life of the working class lad I was then in at least a couple of ways.

Firstly, Danny got me reading.

Reading for a working class boy was not as rare in the 1980s as it is now but still it was pretty unusual. A rarity that knocks through of course to the publishing industry - where in December 2024, 68% of workers were female and 66% from professional classes - and to the types of books that get comissioned and promoted and so ultimately read.

Suffice to say that a male from a non-professional family (me), publishing a book with a working class male protagonist (Floaters) is about as rare in the UK publishing industry today as rocking horse shit.

The second way that Danny changed my life came later.

As I reflected on the book in my teens and twenties - now more aware of the financial and cultural grooves of history - I saw in it a blueprint for a genuine progressive political agenda, which was an alliance between the skilled trades (Danny’s Dad), the law (Sergeant Samways), and the professional classes (Doc Spencer), acting covertly to check the power of a domineering aristocracy (Victor Hazell).

And so, many years later again, I pinched this idea of smuggling a programmatic political alliance into a novel, and slipped it into Floaters.

As mentioned above, the central relationship and alliance in Floaters is between a working class lad and a radicalised boomer. Together, they stand up against misguided corporate and political power. These two groups, the pre-work and the retired, give the title of Floaters its second meaning.

They are the floaters. They have the wriggle room. These two classes of people, the old and the young, are not, as with myself and all the middle-aged people I know, strapped to the hamster wheel of responsibility and bread-winning. They are floating a bit more. They are free.

And it also seems to me that they have complimentary skills. Vigour, idealism and energy from the young; contacts, organisational smarts, and cash from the old.

Jeez - imagine what these two groups of people teaming up on a nation-wide scale might do. I’ve tried to make a start imagining it in Floaters.

So yes, the book is about sewage in the water, and is a caper and a comedy and an entertainment, but like Danny it also imagines a progressive political alliance between groups of people who together might really make a difference.

Over to you.

*Dahl was unquestionably an antisemite, which unquestionably I deplore