I will be ready for it now if it ever happens but wouldn't have been without this prior warning. I remember a few years ago when a story came out that schoolchildren had been included on the interview panel assessing potential teachers at a school and one of them had asked a candidate to dance to a Michael Jackson record.
I have decided that the best course of action is to say, Put the music on, then and then remain motionless in your chair, staring at the interviewer who had issued the invitation. If and when they point out that you aren't dancing you can proceed to question their definition of 'dance', examine notions of stillness, non-dance and anti-dance with them and put it to them that if they expected dance to involve movement then perhaps they had a rigidly mainstream perception of the medium.
And then it turns out that one possible motive behind asking the question is to see whether the candidate will stand their ground and be confident enough to refuse.
So perhaps I got it right after all.
I'm not completely averse to dancing even if I'm not as prone to it as I was a few decades ago but it has always been something I prefer to do when I feel like it and not to order. And it's not the only thing.
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Portsmouth has some poetry events of note forthcoming in the Autumn, mainly thanks to Tongues and Grooves who are marking their first 10 years. George Szirtes, Penelope Shuttle and Tim Liardet will be joined by Maggie Sawkins for this, http://www.poetrybooks.co.uk/projects/43/ and it should be worth supporting.
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And The Perfect Murder, my new title, is 'with the printers', undergoing some sort of surgery by negotiation at present, but I'm sure it will look good and within a reasonable distance of what I hoped it might look like when it is finished.
The ISBN system might have moved on since I last had anything to do with it, though. I've submitted the same old hard copy form as I have done ever since 1990 but there's no sign of the title anywhere on the internet. Oh, no. I hope I don't have a labyrinthine journey through some vast bureaucracy to sort that out. Possibly not, there are still a few organisations that one can ring up and find a very helpful person at the other end.
Otherwise I might have to ask if it would help if I danced for them and then just sit and stare until they give way.
