This is a book that includes some of the most famous and infamous Daily Trumpet entries.
From situations vacant to headlines, lonely hearts to the sadly passed. Heaps upon heaps of the Trumpet’s efforts to rectify wrongs and cocking stuff up even further.
It is a newspaper that rejoices in its inefficiency because it has earned a load of brass for Sir Basil despite being the bane of its editor’s life. But cash is king and so he’ll have to lump it or b*gger off.
Enjoy the bloops, the errors, the typos, the in-yer-endos, they have been crafted from the best of wasted minds for your amusement – and also for charity.
NB: It’s a book for grown-ups so if any offence is caused: tough.
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The idea for the Daily Trumpet came from a provincial newspaper I used to read every Friday when I lived in Haworth. I went out with a cricketer and every Friday in the King’s Arms the team would gather and read out the reportage of the previous week’s match hoping for a mention of their sporty acumen. But more often than not, they got something wrong.
A Frank became a Fred, someone’s twenty-three-year old age was inflated to eighty-three and I noticed that over time they were looking out for the bloops more than they were the flattery.
This lodged in my brain for twenty-years, until it was needed. Until I wrote The Teashop on the Corner and needed a device to carry information. And the Daily Trumpet was born and I only ever intended to use it for one book.
Then I needed its services again. And again. And again. And in My One True North, we go into the belly of the actual Trumpet offices which in my head are very like the offices of the Barnsley Chronicle for I write a column for them in it every week. The editor there is a good bloke and has helped me so much with newspaper background. It’s a privately owned paper, like the Trumpet, but there the similarities end. Sir Basil Stamper is not based on anyone, he was formed in my imagination. The Chron is run properly, not as a lucrative joke.
By the time The Happiest Ever After came out South Yorkshire’s favourite newspaper was covering the whole of Yorkshire. A few books down the line and they’ll be national, international, interplanetary.
I had stores of bloops waiting to be utilised, so when people said ‘You should write a book of them’ I thought, that might be quite a good idea. It was my pal and fellow novelist Jill Mansell’s idea to get people to cough up to be mentioned in a Daily Trumpet entry for Yorkshirecatrescue.org. I couldn’t believe how many people queued up to be humiliated. The coffers of the charity are fuller by a few grand thanks to Jill’s idea.
So here we are with a dedicated book of gaffes to give people a fix as the Trumpet won’t be used in the next book I’m writing. There will be future editions of it so just in case you wished you’d been part of it all, watch out for me advertising the chance to have your name in the next Trumpet.
