Chris Bell 2005

It’s taken me a while to document my contribution to this year’s SA4QE. This year, because of all the extra work involved in organising and attending the Some Poasyum (I travelled out of a New Zealand summer into a UK winter to be there) – and the fact that I was away from my laptop computer – I decided on a single, short quote that could be handwritten, three times, on sheets of yellow paper I had bought at my Mum’s local craft shop. I’d taken my Bloomsbury paperback of Mr Rinyo-Clacton’s Offer to the UK as my ‘carrying book’, and had re-read most of it on the Singapore-Heathrow leg of the flight. It seemed to me that the following epigraph was particularly well suited to this year’s SA4QE and all the excitement and anticipation surrounding the 2005 Some Poasyum:

“Things don’t end; they just accumulate.”

- Jonathan Fitch

from Mr Rinyo-Clacton's Offer

By 4 February, I had decided on three suitable locations for distribution of my quote. I recorded these in the blue exercise book I was using for the notes I was accumulating for a short story I’d been working on:

1) The Tesco supermarket in Hanley, Staffordshire, between the Glenfiddich bottles on the liquor aisle.

2) At the White Lion, a wonderful English pub in the village of Ash, Shropshire (it serves excellent food, if you’re ever in the area).

3) At Lockbrook Place, in Bath, under a cup in the living room of a friend’s house (she found the quote almost immediately, so the element of surprise was minimal).

The rewards of 4Qating grow year by year, and although I never know whether any of the quotations I have distributed have led anyone to read a Russell Hoban book, let alone convert them to life as a Krakenista, I must admit to experiencing a growing sense of superstition about the act; it makes me feel lucky. Not to spread the quotes would make me feel star-crossed.

- Chris