Tunnel vision?

Another ‘interesting’ thing that happened at the Gothenburg book fair was caused by me eating Daughter’s ancient saffron bun from December. I grabbed the last one from her freezer and two and a half days later I came to be eating it as I was gathering my thoughts in the corridor by the press centre.

It was dry, but it was food, and after a while the woman sitting in the armchair opposite me asked where on Earth I’d got hold of a saffron bun in September. One thing led to another, so we were soon chatting. I told her about Bookwitch, and she told me about Nya Tider. Neither of us was well informed about the other’s interests.

If you look up Nya Tider on Wikipedia it will describe it as a right extremist magazine. It seems they booked a stall at the fair, and when the fair organisers realised what they’d done, they tried to ban them. But a contract is a contract, so they got in. I’m tempted to feel they have the right to be there, but that all the extra attention was unfortunate.

My new ‘friend’ clearly liked them. They might even have been the only reason she had come. She abhors the tunnel vision you get from the ‘corridor of opinion’ which she kept referring to. Apparently Nya Tider tells it like it is.

It was an interesting conversation, which began in normality and ended up – very politely and in a civilised manner – at some place I’d not expected to visit. She finished by telling me about something she’d read in the Guardian online, and I sincerely hope she was mistaken.

I suppose it was for the best that I’d never heard of the magazine as we chatted, or I’d have found it hard to keep going. Most of my enlightenment has come from looking things up afterwards.

One other thing I found odd. Swedes are crazy about books and that’s why they come to the fair. She was a regular, as far as I could ascertain. I told her about being there for Meg Rosoff. She’d never heard of her, which is fine. But she’d also never heard of the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award, which is also fine, but seems plain weird.

It was around this point that Meg turned up. I didn’t introduce them. Probably just as well.