Rejoice - we are a great grandmother

I don't know if I mentioned it, but I have two daughters (Jessica - 11 and Luisa - 9). Usually they are hanging around like a bad smell and I am forever banishing them to some far off park (Glasgow abounds in them) to recreate a kind of 50's childhood.

In January one of their guinea pigs, Lucy, was taken from us by a fox (Glasgow abounds in them), and we had to find a replacement girl to keep bereaved Cocoa company. You should always keep guinea pigs in pairs as they are sociable creatures. Same sex pairs otherwise you will be abounding in them.

We traced what seemed to be the only female guinea pig in Glasgow to a shop on the southside and set out one snowy afternoon to pick her up. The 10-week old guinea pig was so tiny that my girls named her Minnie (after the maid in Larkrise to Candleford).

Last weekend, Minnie's bottom seemed to have expanded enormously and our French neighbour (who works in some capacity with animals) proclaimed, 'Ooh, la, la, I zeenk shee eez pregnant' (okay, he never said 'ooh, la, la'). None of us really believed him. But lo and behold two days later, when Jessica went to check the cage, there were four tiny, but perfectly formed guinea pigs. In my effort to be more colourful on this blog, I will be posting pictures.

Which makes me a great grandmother of Zinzh-zhinzh, Buttercup, Sooty and Spiderpig (because she keeps trying to climb walls). Don't say publishing is all about books. Needless to say, when the little blighters are 5 weeks old, we will be taking them back to the shop. But not in front of the children.

The pitfalls of owning a long-established publishing house outside London

Now that is quite long for a title.

In my life before The Publishing Cupboard I worked for HarperCollins. Or to be more precise, Collins. I was fortunate enough to be offered a good editorial job outside London (Glasgow) and ended up staying 15 years (until they shoe-horned me out).

I was surrounded by people who had worked there for practically all their lives. HC has its head office in London and while I was still at Collins, it transpired that the average workspan for someone in London was 18 months. In Glasgow it was 11 years.

11 years is good for stability, but imagine what it means in terms of pensions. Collins was established by the Collins family and they really took care of their employees. There were after- work clubs, tennis and squash courts, a football pitch and even a 9-hole golf course. Who wouldn't want to stay. Publishing (when not pressurized) must be one of the most pleasant environments to work in.

The pension fund is a massive beast. It represents probably thousands of years of staff loyalty. Whoever runs HC has to take responsibility for this beast. When the stock market falters it can wreak havoc with the beast's food source. And the beast must be fed.

This is when the sacrificial period kicks in. And it looks like they're entering one now with the announcement of a potential 5% cut in the workforce. This puts huge pressure on an already depleted workforce (the result of previous sacrificial periods).

Perhaps it is time to avoid the knee-jerk approach. Why not look at the positive side of Collins' legacy. There's a century of titles stretching from Collins English Dictionary to the Bible and Shakespeare. Those are the obvious ones. Mining Collins' archives and valuing (rather than discounting) the brand could prove a much more creative response to the problem.

My fifteen years at Collins were some of the most happy. It was certainly a brilliant apprenticeship to allow me to set up The Cupboard.

websites

It is not so much a moan as a musing on websites. Everybody seems to build them, wield them, decorate them at a drop of a hat. I, on the other hand, remain baffled. Maybe I am not of the correct generation.

When I began The Publishing Cupboard I bought an off-the-peg website and was optimistic that I would be able to handle it quite easily. It is Zencart, after all. Which always makes me think of a shopping trolley. Which makes me think it must be as easy as a trip to the supermarket.

But two years later I approach the back of my website (the bit you don't see) with a girding of the loins and some trepidation. It still remains a mystery to me. Now and again I try following the tutorials in the hope it will all come clear and that I will be adding pages, links and sound with the best of them.

In search of a clearer understanding of websites, I bought a secondhand copy of a Ladybird How it works: the Computer. I reckoned that this would help me understand a world where the workings depend on a yes/no answer. Reader, I gave up.

I fear it is like my attitude to bicycle gears. I know they are useful and necessary but I just don't understand how they work. Perhaps what I need is a Nod off to Zencart.