Just a quick note to let you know that Ideas Above Our Station will be featured in an Easter promotion in WH Smith Travel Stores, which is essentially the WH Smith’s you find at the main train stations and airports. It’s a 3 for 2 promotion and runs for two weeks starting on 31 March. It should be highly visible over this period and Route feel it is quite an attractive option in a 3 for 2 purchase. This is quite a coup for a short story anthology, there’s not many get this kind of exposure. It’s all credit to it’s performance in these stores to date, which is where we aimed it at, so all’s good on that front. Of course with it being in the major airports, there’s no telling where these stories are travelling to.

As you may know I have an aversion to blogs as they seem pointless egotistical rants and so keep mine to a purely factual basis in relation to publications. But I’m going to break that rule because the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard passed away yesterday, 6th March 2007 and I feel that it would be befitting to remember the postmodern thinker who recognised that surface had replaced content in late capitalism in a format which does exactly that! We cultural critics are a right barrel of laughs aren’t we?

Anyway, Baudrillard was largely thought of as a science fiction theorist due to his abstract and often fanciful philosophy, something which particularly irked the cold rational logic of his British compatriots. Yet when you see bland celebrities such as Katie Price, aka Jordan, using her ‘celebrity’ to sell toy ponies to children you can’t help but wonder what kind of reality we have entered. How did someone with the largest artificial breasts in Britain ever become a role model for children? What message does that send out? It’s a bit like Bush setting up a burger van in Iraq. But in the world of hyper reality in which surface has replaced substance, bland capitalism can survive. Beckham, Goody, Williams, Jordan milk the bastard dry, this jungle is yours for the taking.