A literary celebration

It’s taken a bit of arranging, I can tell you, but I’m delighted to say that the evening of 4 June will see a double celebration. My firm, Mace & Jones, has decided to mark Liverpool’s year as European Capital of Culture by launching a short story competition. And the same occasion will also see the official, if marginally belated, local launch of Waterloo Sunset. The event will be introduced by Colin Hilton, chief executive of Liverpool City Council. And this is all going to happen at Liverpool’s new, and rather glamorous city centre hotel with a Beatles theme, the Hard Day’s Night Hotel.

There is always a tendency for cultural celebrations to focus on visual and performing arts, and for literature to be rather neglected. I did wonder if Liverpool’s cultural year might go the same way, and so I’m glad that my partners have agreed to fly the flag for the written word. It’s true to say that the main reason I joined Mace & Jones rather than some other firms when I was about to qualify as a solicitor many years ago was that both the senior partner and his deputy had published books; I felt they were people with like minds, and so it proved. Both men understood my literary ambitions, and were never patronising about those ambitions (unlike some of those from glitzier firms who interviewed me) and I loved working with and learning from them.

Details of the short story competition will be found on the firm’s website shortly. In the meantime, anyone who would like to come along on the evening on 4 June should drop me an email, so I can sort out invitations with my colleagues in our marketing department who are working hard to make the event (which runs from 6 pm to 8 pm) thoroughly enjoyable.