Almost exactly two years ago, I met Santa.
No, you didn’t read that wrong. It was, truly, only two years ago.
Let me set the scene.
It was a grey, gloomy, rainy Saturday – one of those days where you get
the impression that it’s never going to get fully light – in late November 2012. For reasons which I won’t trouble you with
here, I was spending the day, on my own, in Stratford-upon-Avon.
On a previous visit to Stratford, I’d come across a quirky
little place called The Creaky
Cauldron. It’s situated in Henley
Street, just a few doors down from one of Stratford’s more famous attractions,
the Shakespeare Birthplace. The Creaky
Cauldron describes itself as “a wizarding world of wonder”, and anyone who
loves the world of magic in general, and Harry Potter in particular, can
happily pass an hour or two revelling in the place’s truly magical atmosphere. I remembered that on my previous visit, there
had been lots of fascinating exhibits in all the rooms, and I was looking
forward to seeing them again.
But on this occasion, the place had been redecorated for
Christmas. The magical themes were still
there, but the exhibits were now geared much more towards the Festive Season. Including, according to the poster outside,
Santa in his grotto.
Oh well, I
thought, I won’t need to bother with that
part of it.
How wrong I was.
Santa, it seemed, was non-negotiable.
I’d made my way through the museum’s maze of corridors and
ended up on the top floor, where a young lady in elf costume was waiting at the top of the
stairs. “Once you’ve finished looking
round these rooms,” she said, “I’ll take you through to see Santa.”
“Oh, thank you,” I said, trying not to sound surprised or
self-conscious.
Santa himself was a kindly-looking, very well-spoken fellow
with twinkly blue eyes. He seemed not
the slightest bit fazed to find that his visitor was a solitary middle-aged
woman with rain-bedraggled hair and mud-splattered jeans. (He did not, to my relief, invite me to sit
on his knee.) After we’d said “Good morning,”
he asked me what I would like for Christmas.
I opened my mouth to reply.
What came out was: “I’d like to get my novel published.”
Without batting an eyelid, he answered, “What sort of novel
is it?”
I told him a little about it – that it was based on Shakespeare’s
Romeo & Juliet, but that in my
version the story had a rather happier outcome.
“That sounds fascinating,” he said. “Now – have you got a proofreader? And an editor? And have you been in contact with a
publisher?”
My goodness, I
thought. I expect he gets a lot of weird requests – but what a
professional-sounding answer. Aloud I said, “I’ve made some enquiries about that.”
“That’s good,” he said.
“It sounds as though you’re going about it the right way. I wish you the very best of luck. And a very merry Christmas.”
That was in 2012, and publication still seemed as far away
as ever. But less than a year later I signed
a contract with a wonderful publisher
, and in early 2014 my Romeo & Juliet novel, entitled The
Ghostly Father, was released. My
second novel, a romantic intrigue entitled Nice
Girls Don’t, was to follow a few months later.
Did Santa really work a little magic for me, back on that
rainy Saturday two years ago, a mere few yards from Shakespeare’s birthplace?
I’d certainly like to think so.
