The Art of Persuasion

It was time to choose a pen name, something to put after Graham.  I had to scrap my first idea, Eye, as Google was suspicious.  When I tried to register for an email account, their website challenged me to prove that Graham Eye was a real person.  That was a kind of board game with robots which I could never hope to win.  In fact, I used to know a boy called Michael Eye.  I remember him very well, a quiet classmate in fourth grade.  I wonder how he’s coping in the digital age.  It’s not as though I chose Graham Arse, is it? I was disappointed.  Eye was good.  It’s a motif in the book I wrote.  Arse is, too, of course. 

In the end, I just stuck with the original, Spaid.   It’s hard to find the right name.  I don’t know what’s more difficult, though: getting people to believe you, or machines.  Children normally get what they want.  At school, we had French lessons at the top of a tower.  The master was an anxious Frenchman who has my sympathy now, although we tore him lovingly apart at the time.  One trick worked especially well.  When monsieur was looking somewhere else, a boy climbed over the window sill and down the drain pipe, then lay spread-eagled on the tar below.   It was a long way down.  His friends shouted and peered over the sill, calling on sir to come and look.  He did, then ran in horror down the spiral staircase.  I can still hear his stiff shoes tapping down the stone steps like a frantic, old typewriter.  The boy on the ground climbed back up the pipe.  We didn’t see the master’s face when he got downstairs, but we saw it when he came back up.  The young victim was at his desk again, and, for once, everybody was working. 

Here’s another difficult one – how to get people to give you money.  Buy your book, for example.  Or just hand over a coin.  In India, naked sadhus hang around bus stations, standing in front of well-off travellers with young children.  You pay them to go away.  One grey-beard I saw had tied a red string around his penis the way a girl binds up her pony tail.  The unexcited organ was at least six inches long.  It’s what we tell our pupils at school.  I mean, use the talents God has given.

 

Elsewhere, children who have never been to school do the same sort of thing.  Outside Rome’s Termini station, gypsy girls surround foreign tourists and lift their billowing frocks above their heads. You see little skeletons underneath a layer of skin.  Does embarrassment make people generous?  Some things must be true in every culture.  It could work on my reviewers.