Taking the elephant in the room for a walk

Here's my report from Crimefest 2023 written from high up a very lovely mountain.

There's something very wrong with this picture.

I suspect there's more than a few things wrong with the people in it.

We missed Michael's sanity.

We missed Annamaria's chatter.

We missed Jeff's jokes  ( well we didn't, we missed Jeff but the jokes.....)

Stan in charge

Two people not to be trusted. Both of them will be joining me on the window ledge later in the year.

Don't tell them as they don't know it yet.

And as indie authors, they had Sum Up machines with no internet signal.

That was beyond me.

                                                           Stan looking glad that it was over.

Stan, to our right, has just told a joke.

The Fun Girl Three

Team Orenda

Cara has just realised there's only water in that bottle.

But they are both tasting it to make sure.

This was an event I did in Glasgow the weekend after Crimefest.

It was 9.30 am

Wine and whisky in the green room.

And it falls to me to tackle the elephant in the room. I've no real idea what's going on and some of it I can't repeat as that was part of a quiet conversation, more of a confidential chit chat.

I wasn't at the infamous speech at the dinner on Saturday night so I can't comment on what was said either.

But it would seem, somebody felt  threatened. And took to twitter.  

As Catriona MacPherson once said just because you feel threatened, it doesn't mean to say you are being threatened. Those are two quite seperate things.  

I can report on the subject of chit chat at the dinner before (Friday) and the dinner afterwords (Sunday). 

The talk before was about those in charge of the Bond catalogue and those in charge of the Christie catalogue saying that they are happy to remove words that are now deemed offensive but, the sexism, the drinking and the smoking will stay. The very British sense of class in the Agatha Christie books is correct for its time. 

I'm not sure what was said at the speech but the writer of colour that I was talking to on Sunday was not offended by the speech in any way. She just said the speaker just let the elephant in the room walk about a bit, as he was only saying what most people were thinking. More than that its difficult to say. 

But I did have to snigger when I saw on twitter that the man who made the speech with the 'offending comments' was ' being outed', he was named and shamed. 

Doesn't take much detective work to look at the front of the program as that would have told you. 

Anyway, I think I'll side with the Canadian University who published a survey which was then banned because the results might have been seen as offensive. So they published another survey that showed the biggest block to serious debate in an attempt to move a difficult situation forward is the inability to have serious debate without somebody getting offended. And being banned.

I'm away up a mountain! I might stay there.

Cheers

Caro